Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend?

By Darius Okolla

Six hundred and seventy-one kilometres north of Nairobi, close to the border with Uganda, Sudan and Ethiopia, lies the dusty town of Lodwar in Turkana County, a rustic regional headquarters surrounded by a vast, sparse, thorny landscape that hosts the largest desert water body in the world, Lake Turkana.

The recent discovery of oil in the region has thrown the county into the national limelight, giving it newfound importance because of its resource matrix. But even as the oil extraction begins, a process that has been marred by opacity, accusations of corruption, and conflict over the division of profits between the locals and the national government, an older discovery remains relatively unknown—archeoastronomy.

Archeoastronomy is the study of how people in the past understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these discoveries, and what role the sky played in their cultures. It is a multi-disciplinary field that includes geomorphology, art, astronomy, and religion.

The basalt pillars discovered at Kalokol, Lothagam, Manemanya, Lokori and Namoratunga in the Turkana region in 1970s, are said to align with seven major stars: Aldebaran, Sirius, beta Triangulum, Pleiades, Bellatrix, central Orion and Saiph. The name Namoratunga is interpreted to mean either “dancing stones” or “people of stones”. There is contestation as regards the dating of the rock formations, with some claiming they were installed around 300 BC while others say they date as far back as 2400 BC.

Some of the pillar sites have sophisticated underground burial sites containing as many as 160 graves all facing in one direction and marked by horizontal and vertical stone slabs jutting out of the ground.

These rock formations have been linked to similar ones among the Cushitic people of southern Ethiopia, in the Nile Valley in Egypt, and among the Nilotic people of southern Kenya. They comprise rock art, ceramics, symbols, writings, and pottery that are collectively referred to as the “Turkwel tradition”.

The remoteness of the sites, the poor accessibility, and the general insecurity in the area have led to little appreciation and understanding of the centrality of these sites to our historical memory as a people. The widespread insecurity is mainly driven by the ease of access to weapons both within and from outside our national borders.

Guns and raiders

For a country with an estimated 700,000 guns in illegal hands, the story of the arming of the Turkana has many starting points depending on whom you ask. Some place it at the point where the Turkana acquired Austrian Steyr AUG rifles from the Italian troops during World War II and later during the Shifta wars. Soon after, they began raiding their Karamojong neighbours across the border in northern Uganda. That is, until April 1979 when the fall of Idi Amin led to the looting of the famous Moroto Barracks in northern Uganda which gave the Karamojong massive firepower and defences.

It is estimated that the barracks had more than 15,000 guns and roughly two million rounds of ammunition from the Soviets. The raid yielded German-made Gehwer 3 NATO army rifles, AK47 assault rifles, and millions in free ammo.

A succession of events between the fall of Amin, the drought in the Moroto water catchment area, and Tito Okello’s miscalculated act of arming and drafting the Karamojong into the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) essentially brought the entire pastoralist belt into localised modern warfare and the Soviet Cold War circuit.

In the 1970s, rural ethnic politics over pasture and livestock spilled into national concerns over territory and mixed with global Cold War politics that saw Gerald Ford supply Kenya with F-5As/5Es fighter weaponry, as Soviet leader Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev courted Somalia’s Siad Barre. Meanwhile, Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Marxist regime rose in Addis and armed the late John Garang’s fast- growing war machinery, the Sudan People Liberation Army (SPLA).

Turkanas meanwhile harnessed their critical geostrategic importance to the Kenyan state as the ethnic buffer at the border, to negotiate with the Kenyatta regime. This happened primarily because an increasingly belligerent Amin threatened Kenya’s territorial integrity, and an expansionist Islamic regime under Defence Minister Gen. Abdel Rahman Mohammed toppled President Jaafar Nimeiry in Khartoum while he was on a trip to the United States.

Further South, the Pokot, faced with threats from the Marakwet to the East, the Ugandan Sebei to the West, the Sabaot to the South-east and the Turkana to the north, amassed their stash of American-made weapons—spoils from the 1977-78 Ethio-Somali Ogaden war. Siad Barre’s men had offloaded their loot of weapons taken from the retreating Ethiopian regiments into the hands of the Pokot fighters.

Former President Daniel arap Moi tried disarming the Pokot thrice, including during the famed 1984 Konyi Lotiriri operation around the Kopokogh area in Pokot north which was followed by a second wave in 1986. But it was the 1989 disarmament, and the subsequent massacre, that underscored the difficulty of removing rifles from private hands in such a conflict-prone region.

If you disarm the Turkana, they could be easily obliterated by the Merille who are north of Todonyang on the Ethiopian border. The Turkana had coexisted with the Merille until their fallout in the mid-1990s after which the Merille fled north into the Omo Valley and the Turkana clans fled south to around Longwarek village on the northwest shores of Lake Turkana.

Disarming the Turkana also risks a repeat of the 1989 Pokot-style massacre, either by the Toposa of Kapoeta in South Sudan, or by the Jie, or the Karamojong of Uganda. The arms inside the pastoralist belt are therefore a case of mutually assured destruction or at the very least represent the risk of strategic damage to the powerful tribes by the lesser ones.

Conflict over pasture, land and livestock puts water prospects into sharp focus, with the Eliye Springs, the Loboli swamps and Aiyanginyang water catchment areas a playing strategic role in the provision of water for sustenance, and leading to clan-based resource conflicts in the region.

The politics of the colourless gold

Previously known as Lake Rudolf, the 6,500km² Lake Turkana is fed by the Omo River from south- western Ethiopia, and the Turkwel and Kerio Rivers from the south and southeast of the lake, respectively.

Water is becoming the centre of region-wide ecological, demographic, and societal pressures in this arid landmass and conflict over water and pasture have emerged as the real strategic risks. To properly define what will be at stake in a few years based on the county’s current resource trajectory, we must begin with the recently discovered aquifers.

The mapped Turkana and Lotikipi aquifers hold more than 250 billion cubic metres of water against an annual national usage of just 3 billion cubic metres. For context, the two aquifers —the Lotikipi Basin Aquifer and the Lodwar Basin Aquifer—could supply the water needs of the entire country at the current population rate for at least 70 years. The two aquifers were identified using advanced satellite exploration technology.

The discovery resulted from the GRID MAP (Groundwater Resources Investigation for Drought Mitigation in Africa Program) groundwater mapping project, and was announced at a 2013 international water security conference in Nairobi. The find was then confirmed by drilling conducted in 2015, but there is a need for further studies to more accurately quantify the reserves and assess the water quality.

But it was the 1989 disarmament, and the subsequent massacre, that underscored the difficulty of removing rifles from private hands in such a conflict-prone region.

The Lotikipi Basin Aquifer is located west of Lake Turkana basin and studies show it to be a part of previous surges in the size of Lake Turkana hundreds of years ago. The technology combined seismic mapping, remote sensing, and available groundwater data to explore and ascertain the presence of groundwater over such a large, arid, and rocky area. On its own, Lotikipi could potentially triple Kenya’s strategic water reserves and meet its medium-to-long term water needs.

The relatively smaller Lodwar Basin Aquifer could serve as a strategic reservoir for Lodwar, Turkana County’s main town, and the Lokichar, Kainuk, and Lokitaung areas. Three other aquifers have also been identified in other parts of Turkana County but are still subject to mapping and confirmation by drilling and assessment.

The politics of black gold

In 2012, right around the time the aquifers were discovered, Kenya discovered oil in the Lokichar area. Categorized as light and sweet with a light to medium oil grading API scale of 32-38 and a sulphuric content below 0.5%, the discovery has a high wax content, which would make production, transport, and storage costs relatively high.

Even up to the time of the sale of the first 200,000 barrels to Singapore at a cost of US$1.4 billion, the actual breakeven cost of Turkana crude oil remained a closely guarded piece of information. At US$60 a barrel, the sale was a US$2 discount on the day’s market prices.

The Lokichar crude fields contain an estimated 560 million barrels in proven and probable reserves and are expected to produce up to 100,000 barrels per day from 2022. A barrel is a standard unit used by the oil industry representing 159 litres or 42 gallons of crude oil.

The logistical challenge of extracting the oil in Lokichar, 912 kilometres away from the port of Mombasa, Kenya’s largest port, further complicates the economics of mining and exportation.

Water is becoming the centre of region-wide ecological, demographic, and societal pressures in this arid landmass.

The project was already facing headwinds when the Kenyan government, through the Ministry of Petroleum, hired an undisclosed firm to audit the petroleum prospects and projections in 2016. So when the British oil explorer Tullow Oil served the Ministry with a KSh204 billion bill for its six years of work in the Lokichar oilfields, the state was ready, waiting to challenge that invoice.

This points to a hidden scepticism within the Kenyan petroleum circles as to the reliability of the explorer, and the viability of the oil reserves. The tussle between Tullow and the state arises right at the point where about 40 wells have already been sunk over the last 7-year period.

On the revenue-sharing front, Turkana leaders accepted a 5 per cent share for the locals (down from a proposed 10 per cent share) and 20 per cent for the county coffers. The remaining 75 per cent is to go to the National Treasury.

Devolution meets oil

The lure of the petrodollar has seen nearly 10,000 firms move into Turkana’s once sleepy transit town, establishing retail space, guesthouses, leisure outlets, offices, malls, petrol stations, housing, eateries, and agribusiness. Devolution and auxiliary services to the oil economy have pushed the county’s GDP ranking to about KSh11 billion as per the 2017 County Gross Product report.

Still, the boom has not translated into much in the lives of the locals, as a 2018 report put the poverty incidence at 756,000 of the 1.2 million residents, and the illiteracy rate at 80 per cent. Additionally, the Lokichar crude fields carry the implicit risks of crowding out the other economic sectors and disincentivising capital investment in pastoralism, education, transport, and hospitality that have been the economic mainstay for decades.

For the oil explorers and related service providers, relations with the locals have not always been rosy. Protests by locals in 2013 during Tullow’s drilling launch, and in 2018 during the first shipment of crude, regarding jobs and other benefits, led to a truce and better engagement by the firm and its stakeholders. Loss of pasture as urban development and gazetted blocks crowd out grazing fields does not augur well for the pastoralist communities.

The discovery of oil has triggered border conflicts in Kalingorock, Lorogon, and Nakwamoru, and as far away as Kainuk town in the South. Juluk and Napeitom areas have not been spared either, even as a section of neighbouring Pokot leaders lay claim to the Lokichar basin.

Decades of a pastoralist lifestyle have left the broader community with few modern skills and local subcontracted firms trying to hire specialists and experts in machining, fabrication, refrigeration, manufacturing, engineering, energy, and construction, as well as service-sector workers are facing challenges.

Three major initiatives have been undertaken to upskill, reskill and build the capacity of the local workforce. The county government has already spent KSh90 million setting up, upgrading and retooling village polytechnics, while Mount Kenya University has set up a KSh600 million (US$6 million) campus to offer oil and water-related courses. The Canadian-headquartered local oil explorer Africa Oil has invested KSh100million (US$1 millions) to upgrade the Lodwar Youth Polytechnic to teach a variety of blue-collar skills.

The Kapese airstrip in Lokichar, owned by African Camp Solutions (ACA), received a major KSh175 million facelift to extend the runway to cater for larger local planes. Regional airlines have now started operating daily flights to Turkana, including Phoenix Air, Astral Aviation, Safarilink, Flying Doctors, Tropic Air, and other chartered aircraft contracted by Tullow Oil to ferry its staff.

Land prices in the area have increased five-fold as prospects for oil bring in speculators, with the attendant complaints of land grabbing, zoning disputes, land titling challenges, and lack of access roads. An eighth of an acre piece of land that cost KSh50,000 in 2013 now prices at around KSh400,000.

Tullow has also leased 420 acres from residents in the Kapese area to build a new camp, located just seven kilometres from Lokichar town and 90 kilometres from Lodwar. This will be Tullow’s fifth camp as it was already operating from Ngamia and Twiga camps, as well as in the Engomo and Ekales camps.

Land prices in the area have increased five-fold as prospects for oil bring in speculators.

In early 2021, Tullow Oil, the primary driver of the oil exploration, promised to provide a six-month review of the viability of its operations after the planned sale of its stake in the venture fell through. The fate of the county’s oil boom and the related industries is heavily tied to the report’s final findings, which are expected by the end of 2021.

High production costs due to the nature of the Lokichar crude oil, weak output in Ghana, and the March ethnic clashes in the South American petrol state of Guyana led to announcement of a 16-year low in oil production for Tullow in 2020. Amidst the COVID-19 meltdowns, the firm has warned of a further 16 per cent dip in its production capacity for 2021.

In light of the above issues, it just might be time for Turkana County to begin diversifying its economy away from the oil prospecting industry.

Tapping into the potential benefits of the Lapsset project, the county’s water resources, the Namoratunga sites, and devolved powers, will spur the local economy even as the leaders await the findings of the December 2021 oil report, and its recommendations about the economic viability of the oil deposits in and around Turkana County.

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Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend?

By Darius Okolla In June 2002, veteran Kenyan chef Ms Alice Taabu bagged the prestigious Gourmand-World Cookbook Award in recognition of her two-decade-long career on the famed KBC TV cookery show Mke Nyumbani. Founded in 1995 by Chef Edouard Cointreau, the Gourmand Award marked a critical turning point in Kenya’s food conversation as historical dishes found their place on the global stage, and within a fast-evolving online life and culture spaces.

On June 5th Gourmand will be awarding their 2021 winner amidst a shifting influence in global food tastes, in an event that’s dubbed “the Oscars” or “the Olympics” for food enthusiasts, and one that has been increasingly dominated by chefs from the South and East, notably the Chinese. Alice Taabu’s versatile feature on our TV shows marked a gentle and progressive expression of our food habits within inter-webs that in hindsight we take for granted.

And it’s out of Alice Taabu’s years of pioneering work that now there’s a growing Kenyan culture of cooking shows, online recipes, and marketing of new social trends in food consumption in the internet streets. With their origins in broadcast television in Kenya, they have evolved tremendously with the growth and uptake of Instagram and YouTube.

This includes the adaptation of television food show formats onto multi-platform content channels such as Netflix, Pay-Tv, Amazon Prime, brand websites and digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.

Yet, even as the ever versatile chef Alice stuck to the time-tested free-to-air TV model, younger, more boisterous incomers like Arthur Mwai were pushing beverage and culinary options away from the mainstream into newer spaces, including setting up the famed Psys, first on Langata Road and later in Westlands.

Since the mid-2000s the online food culture has evolved and birthed offshoots of Mke Nyumbani with varying shelf lives and scope. Buoyed by both the growing ease of content creation, falling cost of internet connectivity, and increasing demand for more local content and local delicacies, recipes increasingly find their way online and into the watching experience of Kenyans within ever- expanding digital ecosystems.

The 2010s saw the explosion of the online world as local content creators consolidated their influence, benchmarked against each other, and set-up entire platforms for curating similar content. It’s no wonder then that Yummy was launched a year later, in 2012, Eat Like a King in 2013, Kaluhi’s Kitchen in 2014, Get in The Kitchen on K24 in 2015, and Shamba Chef in 2017.

Kenya’s Anita Kerai secured a 7-part food series on Amazon Prime, and published her 170-page Flavours from Kenya cookbook. Then there’s The Great Kenyan Bake Off which is based on the British Version The Great British Bake Off, Ali Mandhry’s Tamu Tamu, and Martin Munyua of Dads Can Cook who pioneered the conversation around the legal protection of food TV formats 2013.

A 2015 survey by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CAK) showed that the country has 64 TV stations, and that a majority of local TV viewers preferred local content to foreign programmes. So starting in mid-2016 onwards, the state agency mandated all local broadcasters to start airing 40 per cent local content, increasing gradually to 60 per cent.

The preferred formats are usually semi-structured discursive models involving cooking competitions, instructional methods, light entertainment, storytelling, global cuisine tours, and celebrity guests.

Food Shopping Apps

Locally, a February 2021 poll showed that nearly 4 in 5 shoppers are spending more on online shopping with data top-ups (92 per cent), clothing (67 per cent) and electronics (56 per cent) topping the list of products bought. Meanwhile services sought online include cooking recipes and techniques, dancing classes, learning languages, and mastering DIY projects. That number has inched even higher as COVID-19 restrictions closed down brick and mortar outlets across the country.

The music/movies segment tops the list of online search content, followed by electronics with fashion in third position. But the food segment is growing rapidly; online food stockists and delivery firms including E-Mart, Glovo, Chandarana FoodPlus, UberEats, Yum Deliveries, as well as Green Spoon and Jumia Food have recorded spikes in their online demand.

Twiga, Kalimoni Greens, Kibanda Online, Gobeba, and a host of other online platforms have embraced digitisation and online payment systems to cater to the expanding palate of a tech-savvy society. As online food shopping gains traction, the numbers are bound to surge forward as consumers develop trust and make buying decisions based on the online visual displays, coupled with a seamless product and user interaction.

The influencer culture covers both cooking shows, shopping, dishes, recipes, and food markets in short simple, accessible TikTok and YouTube clips, and often highlights both exotic and local ingredients.

In typical Mke Nyumbani format, such shows offer useful tips on cutlery, techniques, recipes, hygiene, new appliances, first aid, or even what to do if things go wrong. The foodie culture blurs the lines between the food reality TV show and the everyday feeding choices of people and families at home.

Then there is the rise of “Indomie Twitter”, a subculture on Twitter which promotes the growth in the variety of foods consumed, sharing of recipes, online food delivery stores, and outlets.

Psychology of food influencer marketing

The question still remains though: why and how does the psychology of food influencer marketing work? What makes Mke Nyumbani, or Dads Who Cook, Shoba’s Cookouts or Indomie Twitter such a social phenomenon. The short answer is that influencer marketing plays directly into the human desire to belong. It amplifies our proclivity towards that which we already are familiar with.

Behavioural psychologists and neuromarketing experts call this the Mere Exposure Effect. All else being equal, the more we’re exposed to something that’s relatable, the more we like it. And fascinatingly, this preference for the familiar often appears to operate outside of our consciousness.

It appeals to our need for social conformity, and our mental processing functions. Basically, our brain is wired to respond to stimulation from influencer marketers whom we already trust at a virtual interaction level. We find their persuasion more authentic, more fun, and more attractive than other types of persuasions. The link is optimised when the awareness and affinity of the consumer gels with the creativity of the influencer.

Hence, for example Shoba Gatimu’s earthy humor, the ingenuity of the Indomie Twitter crew, Hannah Thee Baker’s digital influencing makes food products look good on set, given they are agile chefs who’re good at their craft.

The psychological terrain of the food influencer market is what happens when social users follow friends and famous users rather than corporate brands. These consumers turn to social platforms to connect and find out how people they look up to build their lifestyles and to look for relatable figures to help them filter through the hundreds of choices in the online markets. In turn they consume lots of visual content which food influencers are primed to optimise.

Research shows that well thought-out visual influencer marketing in the food industry incentivises an engagement rate of 7 per cent and can imply conversion rates of up to Ksh7 for every shilling spent. Ultimately, the partnership between brands and influencers is built on the social ingredient that their personas brings, while building up significant returns on investment (ROI).

To understand the psychology of persuasion, author Robert Cialdini places the construction of influence under six metrics: Reciprocation – the internal pull to repay what another person has provided us with. Consistency – we work to behave consistently towards a choice we’ve already made. Social Proof – when we are unsure, we look to similar others. Liking – the propensity to agree with people we like and the desire for others to agree with us if we like them. Authority – we are more likely to say “yes” to others who are authorities. Scarcity – we want more of what is less available or dwindling in availability.

The overall group psychology that happens ends up creating consumer tribes in which the pursuit of consumption of certain meals or dishes built into our ethnic, class, religious or moral influence is reinforced. This isn’t hard given that the need for social conformity is already hardwired into our brain’s reward system.

The evolution of the kitchen influence

An even bigger influence in group-wide food tastes and preferences among Kenyans stems from social sharing. Influence at that level is therefore built into our deep networks of trust, approval, love, companionship and even identity. The most enduring influence on our food tastes therefore comes from the social affections that we’ve built with our friends within family and friendship set- ups.

In the modern family kitchen, efficiency has gradually eroded camaraderie, as technology reorients and at times replaces our cooking traditions. Meanwhile convenience has become king, as cookware, countertops, drawers, ovens and cabinetry signal the gradual evolution of both the home, the consumer society, and technology. Your typical modern Kenyan kitchen now bears little resemblance to the home kitchens of old. Before the dawn of modernity, human life revolved around the kitchen and the farm, and the roles that defined kitchen life were often assigned to the women in the community. This lent the home life to critical contestation at the dawn of modernity as family life shifted away from those two domains and into the urban environment.

The traditional designation of the kitchen as a place for mothers and women in general was challenged by the industrial revolution that drove the locus of civilisation away from the kitchen — and by extension the home — and into the milling factories miles away.

And as Ally Matsoso opines, “As men began to accumulate excess wealth and power, they gained freedoms women lacked. Survival and family stability were no longer their sole motivators. Women, as Nourishers of the family, decreased in influence as the family’s importance decreased, crowded out by commerce. Local bakers could now supply our bread. The spiritual center, the home, had to compete with a material culture, capable of satisfying needs the home once met, and of creating new needs as well.”

What we are seeing at the tail end of capitalism as we know it, is a major shift in food cultures and the nuances built around them. Male chefs grace our TV shows and Instagram food influencers represent a wide range of ages, gender, sexes, class, and persuasion.

There is increased diversity in meal plans, and orthorexia is now a prevalent habit that is defined as a genuine and critical concern about what someone eats. This could range from giving up sugars or oils or meat as a matter of preference. It can also be seen in veganism, vegetarianism or pescatarianism, diets that are adopted either because of health concerns, ecological issues, religious beliefs, or a myriad other social, cultural, moral or personal desires. Entire groups like Hindus, Adventists, Muslims have given up certain foods for one or more of the aforementioned reasons.

Recipes are getting increasingly local as health concerns, and choice of nutrition over taste gives preference to local delicacies once considered not cool enough for our social media streets. Nduma, ngwaci, boiled/roasted maize, bean bread, osuga, banana bread, githeri, chicken and ugali, fish, groundnuts, vegetable dishes, irio, kimanga, cassava and bean mash, matoke, mbaazi, njahi, porridge — to name just those — are sneaking their way back onto our dinner plates, Tiktok, YouTube, and Gram.

In this sense, the growth of cookery shows and food influencers is not so much the ultimate co- option of the home kitchen by modernity, as it is an imperfect recreation of what was, until the dawn of modernity, the soul of the home.

At the end of the day, the ultimate food influence in our lives may not be the familiar and likable chefs on TV, but our mothers and fathers, their recipes, the dinner table, and the food rituals in our family kitchen.

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This article is part of The Elephant Food Edition Series done in collaboration with Route to Food Initiative (RTFI). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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

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Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend?

By Darius Okolla

In the everyday human stories, away from the mainstream media-which often functions as the sanitiser and theatre of the elite—the wider Kakamega region dominates the locus of what would pass for interesting cultural news.

The swath of off-the-cuff social and cultural news sways wide, from the death of an entire lineage, tales of bullfighting, chicken kills child, cockfighting episodes, and the recent tragic student stampede. There’s the birth of strange calves, man marries sister, walking corpses, wife swaps, and unexplainable phenomena. Kakamega County, it is said, is the Florida of Kenya, and the home of peculiar news.

Granted, one is guaranteed to encounter weird happenings where people exist, but year on year the region has consistently functioned as the gold standard. It could also be that local issues, secluded from the mainstream narratives of society, ends up being given faulty interpretations and tagged as abnormal.

The origins of Kakamega’s cultural tipping point could easily be traced to the infamous James Mukombero’s 2001 murderous spree. On a rainy Sunday night in late April 20 years ago in Bulira village, Kakamega, 43-year-old Mukombero had dinner with his wife, three sons and a daughter before going to bed. His sons retired to their Itsimba, built next to their father’s house.

In the middle of the night, Mukombero crept out of his bed, picked up a machete, and hacked his pregnant wife Susan to death. He then entered his sons’ house and killed the three — Evans, Oscar and Alusiola. His murderous binge was far from over, as he woke up other family members claiming that his wife was unwell and needed to be rushed to hospital. He killed them too, as his brother fled and hid in the maize plantation.

Mukombero killed nine people in a ghastly rage that shook the clan and gripped the nation. From then on, Kakamega solidified its reputation as the country’s purveyor and arena of weird news. Mukombero’s homicidal orgy united a voyeuristic media and a shocked citizenry in a country where the grapevine and cultural literacies long replaced state-controlled narratives, and where rumours function as a sense-making, socialising and interactive medium.

News and their social epidemics

With the largest rural population in the country, coupled with a hugely diverse set of ethnic subcultures, Kakamega County is unsurprisingly a crucible of diverse and competing versions of cultural intrigues.

In the Tipping Point, sociologist Malcom Gladwell talks about the power of context to set off a chain reaction of events, cultural signals, and cues that normalise certain behaviours and beliefs of the kind often reported about Kakamega. The point at which a wide and varied set of complicated cultural news becomes a behavioural epidemic depends on a set of specific personalities, events and spatial conditions.

A large rural-based population like Kakamega’s is by nature much more conservative, culturally complex, rooted in local social politics and taboos, has largely observable behaviour and would gladly embrace tales about events that are out of sync with what many would consider normal. However, this isn’t unique to the region. So that still begs the question: why this one region? And why this one county in the region?

Kakamega could simply be said to constitute higher levels of culture-bound syndromes than other similar enclaves of rural modernity in the country. In The Culture-Bound Syndromes, cultural anthropologist Charles C. Hughes lists 200 localised psychiatric, cultural and physical behaviours that have, at one time or another, been considered culture-bound syndromes. While many of these psychiatric and cultural behaviours are based on local beliefs, many carry with them normalised psycho-spiritual explanations. Culture-bound syndromes especially of the social and behavioural kind are rooted in these unique local anthropologies.

Kakamega’s cultural realities could also be explained by the fact that it borders six other counties, including three of the most populous, with over seven million people existing right within its proximity. Being a transit county, there’s a lot of opportunity to interlink subcultures, widen demographics, and incubate quirky cultural ideas. Hughes and Simon further elucidate that, in theory, culture-bound syndromes are those practices in which alterations of behaviour and people’s experience feature prominently. In actuality, however, many are not actual syndromes at all. Instead, they are local ways of explaining any of a wide assortment of traits and occurrences.

News and confirmation bias

Within the political dysfunctionality of this country in which the media revels in the sensational, Kakamega seems to have produced more than its fair share of colourful characters. The county’s consistent stream of cultural news is one of the nation’s underrated cultural comedies, with the entire county acting as the punchline.

To be fair, it could be that the region is typecast based on the concept of availability heuristics, a cognitive method by which our brain uses shortcuts to process news and draw conclusions. Having been fed a staple diet of editorial news from the region laced with spooky taboos, beliefs and ideas, we may have unconsciously learnt to view the region through a stereotyped lens.

Within these contested editorial narratives, the county’s massive utility value to the wider estern Belt stands in contrast to the largely rural docility that defines its public life. Kakamega region’s political significance is often counterbalanced and even neutered by its ethno-political peer, Bungoma County, which hosts the second largest Luhya subtribe, the Bukusu. Hence, the editorialised cultural and social news inevitably reigns more prominently than the low political bandwidth that the region adds to national politics.

Buoyed by the Kisumu-Webuye highway, Kakamega hosts 8 of the 18 Luhya subtribes, and makes up the second most populous county after Nairobi, close to 2 million people holed up in a mere 3,000 square kilometers of land. It could therefore be that the diversity of the county, the huge rural population, and self-perpetuating mythology is what fuels this comical disrepute.

Kakamega has been among the biggest beneficiaries of devolution, with the region boasting increased trade thanks to the 85-kilometer Kisumu-Kakamega-Bungoma-Webuye highway. A Sh120 million Shirere-to-Lurambi street electrification plan, a ten-year municipality spatial expansion plan from 12,108 acres to 30,394 acres, a park facelift and a Sh400 million World Bank-funded streets upgrade, have anchored the region as the bastion of rural modernity.

Even then, in this theatre of journalistic absurdity, one has to wonder, is the county merely the punching bag of a media that revels in the most ridiculous of news? This is a persistent conundrum that no one can satisfactorily explain.

Just late last year alone, a pastor got bitten while flashing out a beaded snake in Lumakanda, matatu crew kidnapped a cop in Mumias, identical Kakamega twins accidentally met online and Lurambi locals demanded the renaming of a school from Mwangaza (light) to its former name, Ebuchinga (place of fools).

Mukombero’s shocking tragedy may have faded from the nation’s collective memory but the media has continued to inundate us with tales of crazy news including the December incident of a dead man who allegedly refused to be buried. A lot of the county’s news stories range from the silly or weird to the cringe-worthy, to straight-up felonies, to the tragic. Not all the gripping tales from the county are comical although, in Kakamega, the farcical tragedy often wears the mask of comedy.

The worst must be reported

Interestingly, a casual search of Kitale, Kisumu or Meru could easily bring up equally strange tales of sexual, criminal, economic and social deviance similar to Kakamega stories. So that still leaves us with the mystery of why the county is such a hotbed of weird news stories. It could partly be that for news bureaus located in far-flung places the only news worth including in national bulletins is that which falls right off the alley of everyday normal issues. But then, that’s not the preserve of one county, constituency or region.

Could it then be that, as the most advanced county in the region, with great infrastructure and ethno-cultural diversity, the county is simply the best muse a newscaster could wish for? A crucial explanation could be the classic case of the streetlight effect.

An old parable ascribed to 13th Century witty Turkish philosopher Mulla Nasreddin tells the story of a drunkard searching under a street lamp for keys (or wallet depending on who is telling) that he had lost.

A cop on patrol spots the drunken man intently searching the ground near a lamppost and asks him what he could be searching for at this godless hour. The visibly inebriated gentleman replies that he is looking for his keys and the officer offers his help for a few minutes before he asks whether the man is certain that he dropped near the lamppost.

“No,” he replies, “I lost it somewhere across the street.”

“So why look here?” asks the officer.

“The light is much better here,” the drunken man responds.

It could also be that the phenomenon is primarily pegged on the power of a self-perpetuating viral effect and observation bias. In 2018, a section of Twitter planted the idea that weird things happen in Kakamega, and christened it the Florida of Kenya. In observation bias, the suggestion entrenches the mindset, after which you tend to notice news that confirms the bias.

There’s no definitive proof that the county is culturally weirder than any other county. According to the 2016 Kenya police annual crime records, Nairobi and Mombasa top in theft, while Kiambu and Meru lead in overall crime prevalence, Lamu leads by crime index followed by Meru and Kiambu then Isiolo. In none of the listed crime categories—vehicle and other thefts, theft by servant, dangerous drugs, stealing, criminal damage, economic crimes or homicide—does the county feature in the top five. This is replicated in the 2017 and 2018 reports in which the region’s image would pass for that of a pretty peaceful and uneventful county — only that culturally it isn’t.

The Anatomy of a Stereotype

A pertinent downside of the Streetlight Effect is that local newscasters parade simplistic headlines, from man killed over ugali, to corpse protests over unpaid dowry, to man sells wife for Sh500, to corpse refuses to be buried. These editorialised models of stereotyping and curating Kakamega’s regional news reveals the policed ways in which modern media forms engage cultures that defy the stated norms.

There is need for cultural literacy that is pegged on a reimagined way of understanding contexts and peoples in ways that help us to question media grammar and stereotypes. Alternatively, local digital platforms could, and as often as possible should, replace the failed cultural imagination of the mainstream media, and supplant it with nuanced cultural explanations of these “bizarre” news.

Not all these issues are explainable though and the region’s unique demography, cultural symphony, political place in the national discourses, and media voyeurism will lend it to the editorial muse for the foreseeable future. The verdict is still out there whether Kakamega County truly is the Florida of Kenya. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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

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Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend?

By Darius Okolla

On February 16th 2011, the Arab spring hit the streets of Misrata through sporadic street protests, then spread out into other Libyan cities, ostensibly sparked by the arrest of a human rights activist in the restive eastern city of Benghazi. Libya was simply catching on to the spontaneous civil blowup that was sweeping across the region against a litany of social ills, political mess and economic repression in the wider Middle East. Libya, the geographical buffer between Egypt in the east and Tunisia in the west fell into that hysterical upheaval along the Mediterranean strip and colonel Muamar Gadhafi just didn’t have the institutional or diplomatic backing needed to stem such a fallout.

It’s often whispered that by not creating independent judicial, parliamentary and social structures but instead building a ‘rule by the people’ Gadhafi had succeeded in building the country around himself. This worked well to foment his grip, but proved to be the fragility of his stranglehold, once the eruption in the Libyan city of Benghazi began to spread outwards. The 3rd century AD city of Benghazi uniquely resented Gadhafi after he took its capital status to Tripoli and stripped it off its stature and prestige during his 1969 coup.

His mistake also partly explains how within just 10 months, the street protests had morphed into an all-out civil war backed by European countries that eventually toppled him, on 20th October 2011, a rare feat, for a leader who’d held to power since 1969. This Arab Spring was simply the culmination of low-grade isolated fights that had impacted the wider Arab civilization since the days of the radical Muslim cleric Sayyid Qutb and his views on the holy jihad in the 1950s.

Starting in his days as a colonel, Qaddafi has always been an ideologically erratic and pragmatic fox who’s Pan-African ambitions unsettled many primitively territorial, and provincially-minded African presidents around him. He misused this ambition though, to advance Libya’s regional clout as the most lucrative player in the Sahelian, sub-Saharan and Arabian political marketplaces.

Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan chief of state, gives his first speech as Chairperson of the African Union in the Plenary Hall of the United Nations building in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, during the 12th African Union Summit Feb. 2, 2009. The assembly elected Qaddafi to replace Kikwete as chair of the organization. Photo. Wikipedia/Jesse B. Awalt

More than 15 African president and rebel leaders and their respective countries are said to have inordinately benefited from his largesse fueled by his desire to buy or control everyone territorially. It should be remembered that Gadhafi pursued pan-Africanism only after his 1970/80s pan-Arabism dream proved unviable.

The recent coups in Mali and clashes in Niger and Cameroon are simply part of the wider Sahelian cocktail of devastation caused by converging scourges of climate change, weak regimes, violent jihadis, droughts, rising population, raging poverty, arms smuggling, and corruption. Gadhafi had somehow managed to suppress these regional problems through a combination of threats, cash, promises and charisma.

The war lords, South American drug smugglers through the Conakry coast, and Western mining companies all benefited from Gadhafi’s ambitions which inadvertently stabilized the hostile 9.2 million square kilometer Sahara Desert. The desert measures 4800 kilometers in length and 1931 kilometer width landmass and makes up the largest desert in the world.

So when Gadhafi fell, the Sahelian communities on Libya’s southern borders, and in adjacent borderlands, became the recipients of wave after wave of returnees armed with dwindling cash reserves, ideas about democracy, firearms, superiority complex, and battle hardened combat experience.

More consequentially the Libyan crisis produced an estimated 600,000 returning Tuareg welders, blue-collar employees, miners, specialists, returnee migrants, and worst of all, mercenaries. Gadhafi’s inner circle, African dissidents, his lieutenants, and armed mercenaries ended up with large cash reserves, war experience, huge weaponry caches, and rebel networks running from eastern Senegal to western Sudan and across the Red Sea into the Arabian gulf.

When Gadhafi ruled the Sahel, ordering bombings and peace in equal measure across the region, he’d never had imagined that his end would come in the hands of a 22 year old Omraan Shaban. Shaban, a millennial with an elongated nose, a caricature like moustache, a pouty mouth that mimicked a muffled rage, and sunken white eyes became a sensation as part of the team that shot Gadhafi.

A resident of Misrata in the western Mediterranean coast, Omraan Shaban would become the embodiment of the capture of the strongman in the graffiti-laden culvert in Sirte town, and a symbol of youthful hubris or heroism depending on how you look at it. While the anti-Gadhafi rebellion started in the Eastern city of Beghazi the ultimate rivalry would come down to the two western Libyan cities; pro-Gadhafi Ben Walid town, versus anti-Gadhafi Misrata.

In 2012, 5 months after Gadhafi met his death, Omraan, a Misratan and member of the Shield brigade was part of the retaliation against kidnapping of 4 journalists in the pro-Gadhafi city of Ben Walid when he was captured and tortured for his role in the murder of Gadhafi. He’d later succumb to his bullet wounds in a French military hospital in September 2012 where he was receiving treatment.

Meanwhile further south in the Libyan desert border town of Ghat a tall bearded man, dressed in Bedouin clothes drives atop a white Land cruiser in the desert on the outskirts of the Akakus petroleum plant. Gadhafi’s fall had unraveled a 120 years’ truce that had existed between the city’s majority Tebu and Tuareg tribes close to the Libya-Algerian border. Aboubaker Akhaty, a Toureg leader in Libya’s southern city of Ubari reckons that for a civilization built atop a gas reservoir, their existence was always going to depend on a skillful negotiation between the oil companies, marauding mercenaries, Tebu herdsmen and the flow of arms from the northern Libyan cities at the Mediterranean coast.

Destroyed tanks in Masrata, 2012. Photo. Flickr/joepyrek

Mercenaries fleeing the fall of Gadhafi entered small cities that lie just across from the Algerian border town such as Ghat, Madam in Niger and Wath in Chad. The contested city of Ubari or Awbari was the last spot in Libya’s southern desert before these thousands of Gadhafi’s mercenaries vanished into the Sahara wilderness some for good, others not for long.

Ubari’s strategic importance in the Sahelian conflict is defined by the geographical fact that it’s flanked by one of Libya’s largest oilfield’s, El sharara to the north and the largest arms and oil smuggling routes to the south of the city and just north of the Chadian border. The Libya’s southern civil war was triggered 3 years after the fall of Gadhafi when Tebu and Tuareg smugglers started disputes over these lucrative smuggling routes.

An estimated 250,000 of the 600,000 workers who left Libya headed home to Niger, while 70,000 crossed into Chad, homeless and penniless and carrying everything with them from guns, household goods, ambition, hopes, ammunitions and versatility.

Southern Libyan towns like Sebha and Kufra, may not mean much to anyone outside its borders, but the fall of Gadhafi marked the beirut-ization of such cities lending them to the whim and impulses of drug lords, arms smugglers, human traffickers and became an existential threat to weak regimes in Niger, Chad, and northern Sudan. These lawless cities served as the rear attack flank for armed rebel groups like the Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and host to rebel leaders, fleeing soldiers, and their Middle eastern, and Eurasian fixers.

With its origins in the scenic Algeria’s Kalbiye mountains which are part of the Mediterranean Atlas ranges, AQIM formerly known as Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, rebranded in 2007, 4 years before the fall of Gadhafi and would move in to establish its post-Gadhafi territory by recruiting from southern Algeria, south-east Libya and among the Beribiche tribe in the coup-laden northern Mali.

Kidnapped special UN envoy to the Niger’s Agadez region Robert Fowler, a former Canadian diplomat, who was held hostage by AQ-IM for 4 months in the Sahara Desert in 2010, wrote in his book A Season in Hell that “There was a big gulf in the AQIM between those who were black and those who were not. They preached equality, but did not practice it. Sub-Saharan Africans were clearly second class in the eyes of AQIM.” The racially motivated militant groups like AQIM tried filling the vacuum created by the absence of Gadhafi, using recruitment and local spy networks, arms supply, other logistics and illicit trade activities.

By 2013, the post-Gadhafi AQIM spread its tentacles to other parts of the region and forged alliances with murderous groups like Ansar Dine in Mali and northern Nigeria’s Boko Haram. Besides the core Sahelian states, of Mali, CAR, Nigeria, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, northern Chad and Sudan’s Darfur region soon became victims of unmitigated tribal, economic and security crisis after the fall of Gadhafi. Returnee migrants, Tuareg mercenaries and the flow of arms from Gadhafi’s looted weapon caches is what created this precarious security situation in Mali and the wider Sahelian states.

Demonstrably, over the last 10 years, the combined effects of these realities have reinforced existing pockets of unrest within the Sahel region, with increased fallouts around northern Mali. The Tuaregs under the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), with their access to lots of arms, anti-tank and explosives continue to drive their desire for a Tuareg republic in the Western Sahara to be named Azawad.

A series of military losses beginning in late 2011 such as the fall of cities like Gao and Kidal to the rebels by the Malian army, had exposed the dire underbelly of a Post-Gadhafi Sahel. Inadequate resourcing, poor tactical leadership, and failure to master the terrain by the region’s national armies led to about 1000 troops either killed, taken captive or deserted in the French-led Operation Serval, Operation Barkhane and Operation Epervier.

The initial push for a Tuareg country was marked by a motivated secular ethno-nationalist patriotism for a people long loathed by their neighboring tribes as well as the French since they massacred an entire French military convoy led by Eugen Bonnier at Goundam in 1894.

While Niger’s Tuareg returnees came to a land for whom civilization had bypassed, their Malian Tuareg brothers pitched camp at Zaka, in northern Mali a scene straight out of the surface of the moon. The strategic difference is that their Malian cousins had armed themselves with guns, even greater ambition, desert Landcruisers, an ideology and guns, lots of guns.

As Gadhafi sneaked around the town of Sirte trying to evade eventual capture and the French drones above in late 2011, Ibrahim Bahanga his longtime ally headed to Kidai region in Northeast Mali, just outside intadjedite, and not far off from his birthplace, at Tin-Essako. His vision-to establish the Tuareg country of Azawad-would outlive him as he fell under a staged accident, in late August 2011, two months before Gadhafi’s assassination. Bahanga’s death deep in the Malian Sahara Desert in a suspicious car accident few hours before a crucial meeting of Tuareg rebel leaders was the first in a series of major setbacks that were to follow. Few weeks later the Malian Sahel was hit with the worst drought in 27 years taking away attention and crucial war resources-misfortunes were piling. The historically articulate but politically naïve deputy Bilal Cherif took over after Bahanga’s death to continue the quest of MNLA rebel group for an independent Azawad state for Tuaregs.

While Bahanga and Cherif pursued a secular ethno-nationalist ambition, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb AQIM arrived too, with their desert Land cruisers, and awash with guns. There’s was a fundamentalist plan to set up the long desired caliphate that would ideally span the Sahara from Senegal in the West to Sudan in the East and Yemen across the Red Sea. Local Islamic group Ansar Dine awaited the AQIM and together they’d launch a joint war against Malian Army in the north. The 3-way battle lines soon concretized as secular Tuareg nationalists battled with farming bantu southerners in Mali, as well as AQIM’s Islamic militias from the edges of the Sahara.

On January 17th 2012 three months after the death of Bahanga, MNLA launched their first offensive for the liberation of Azawad. The ill-equipped Malian army found itself fighting rebels with competing visions of a liberated desert north; with secular Tuaregs on one front and the Islamic jihadist on the other-causalities mounted. In the south, the Bambara, an ethnic subtribe of the dominant Mande tribe, who made up some of the highest causalities in the Malian military poured out into the streets of Bamako, angered by the images of dead soldiers coming from the Malian insurgency war in the north.

By the time the US state department spokesperson Nuland called the press on 22 March 2012, to voice support for Malian regime under president Amodue Toumani Toure, the military Captain Sanogo had taken over and the president fled the country. As the cool of the afternoon beat off the scorching Malian desert afternoon sun the secular MNLA convoy rode into the Malian city of Gao in pickup trucks, while the Islamic AQIM drove into the town of Timbuktu to the specter of pensive residents. The remaining Malian forward operating bases (FOB) collapsed as Malian Army fled south abandoning stash of cash, weapons, and military infrastructure reminiscent to what had happened to Gadhafi 6 months earlier.

The MNLA Tuareg under Colonel Meshkenani Bela led the conquest into northern Mali and takeover of Gao, but overlooked a critical fact that would haunt them afterwards. They were a minority tribe on the Niger river bend where they were outnumbered by local tribes like the Songhay and the Fulani who were anything but impressed by their takeover. While the Tuareg MNLA entered Gao city through the west, the Islamic Militant Movement for Oneness and Jihad MOJAO which had broken off from AQIM entered through the east and laid claim to sections of Gao-the powdered keg now just needed a fuse.

By March 30th 2012, it soon became clear that Tuareg’s MNLA had neither the capacity nor experience to govern politically and the Islamic MOJAO-buoyed by their merge with terror leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s Al Mulathameen-pounced upon the chance to run and stake claim to Gao.

The former Malian army leader turned Tuareg rebel commander Colonel Al Salat Habi, who oversaw the city of Gao on behalf of MNLA had only one option-to negotiate with Al Qaeda, an enemy he’d fought both as an army man in Aguelhoc town and now as a tribal Tuareg commander at Gao.

By April 2012 Northern Mali fell, regional powers panicked, drug smuggling routes tanked and rerouted to Tanzania and Kenya and hostage taking replaced the collapsing drug trade, and raked in upwards of $250 million for groups like MOJAO. Meanwhile in April 6th 2012 the MNLA under the leadership of Bilal Cherif declared the independence of the state of Azawad. For decades the Malian state had become complacent, even accommodating of the Al Qaeda as a counterforce to the threat of a Tuareg civil war.

Osama Bin Laden’s geographical curiosity of the African Sahel during his time in Sudan, and the desire for a remote desert caliphate had paid off as AQIM ruled the historically and strategically important city of Timbuktu. They imposed a local Muslim Tuareg, Tohar, as their commander. Al Qaida-IM made up in cultural literacy and political tact what they lacked in cash resources.

They partnered with Ansar Dine, used the Tuareg tribesmen in police and civilian roles to smoothen their interaction with local Tuareg populations. But what they achieved through the social and ethnic blend of Ansar Dine, AQIM, through its radical scholars like Abu Al Baraa undid and inspired global rage by introducing public floggings, beheadings, and tearing down of 14th and 15th century historical shrines and structures. The world had to act, and act fast.

It is a testament to the Tuareg’s geo-political illiteracy that their most contested lands is in Northern Mali which is the least mineral endowment of all their lands, smaller in size relative to the adjacent countries and one in which they are demographically outnumbered.

As the situation deteriorated in Northern Mali, the situation is worse in central Mali. There, ethnic Bambara and Dogon tribes organized murderously efficient armed militias, known as Dozo hunters which culminated in Ogossagou massacre that saw 170 Fulani men, women and children murdered.

Across the border in Niger, Bedouin and Tuareg’s Movement for National Justice (MNJ) was already fomenting a rebellion against the massive billion-dollar French uranium mining facility-Areva. It’s a testament to the extreme marginalization that the region remained wretched poor and desolate despite supplying 5% of the world’s high-grade uranium. Residents of Timbuktu pass by Djingareyber Mosque. Photo. Flickr/UN Photo

In June 2012, Azawad in northern Mali soon fell into the hands of Al Qaeda-IM and Ansar Dine, who didn’t waste time in advancing south to the Malian town of Konna and massacred a Malian army regiment in what came to be known as ‘’The Battle of Konna’’. The world’s patience ran out. France sent its tanks rolling north and east of Mali as NATO jets bombarded their strongholds. The Al Qaeda’s last message while atop grey desert Landcruisers was a promise of retreating into the desert but they’ll soon be back to exert Allah’s vengeance on the infidels.

In the last 8 years since, the Tuareg rebels, local armies, and Islamic radicals have since split into hundreds of highly mobile militias that launch attacks on the border between Mali, Niger, Chad, Algeria, Mauritania, northern Nigeria, and Burkina Faso.

In 2008 Mohammed Yusuf, a 38-year-old Salafi preacher in Maiduguri town, northeast of Nigeria and close to the Lake Chad, fed up by the excesses of the southern Nigerian elites, drew crowds towards the promise of caliphate that will redistribute the oil and mining revenues. Yusuf was an admirer and avowed devotee of 14th century Salafist Muslim cleric Ibn Tammiyah. In mid-2009 his followers Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad famously known as Boko Haram clashed with the Army at a custom checkpoint close to Gamboru area in Maiduguri, Nigeria. He was hunted from his in-law’s house, detained then later on mutilated and his body dumped by the road.

The viral video of his cuffed and badly executed body unleashed a reign of terror and retaliations by his loyalists. His deputy Abubakar Shekau took over and wasted no time in reconnecting with Ansar Dine and Al Qaeda in the Maghreb across the border, and over the next 4 years extended an olive branch to radicals as far as Al Shabaab in Somalia.

In 2013 Boko Haram attacked and killed a Nigerian cop in the Northeast town of Baga followed by a major attack at Bama, and the incensed Nigerian army responded in kind by mowing down dozens, torched houses and left behind estimated 180 corpses and countless who drowned in the nearby lake Chad while trying to flee the carnage.

Lake Chad lies further west of Niger, just north of the Chadian Capital N’djamena and borders Cameron, Nigeria and Niger itself. The 1350sq kilometer lake is the largest water body in the Sahel and one of the last buffers against the ravages of the southward expanding Sahara desert. Between 1978 and 1995 the lake shrank 95% unleashing a humanitarian, ecological, and climatic disaster only comparable to the globally catastrophic drying up of the Aral Sea in the Soviet Union and its direct impact on nearly 100 million lives.

The climatic disaster has been accompanied by civic, geographical and colonial disasters such as the demarcations that cut off the villages from Baga, the regionally largest and closest trading post in Northeast Nigeria. The Chadian regime inadvisably moved the state’s regional offices from the lake’s largest island to the city of Bol on the shores among the Islamic Kanembou tribe and away from the fishing Bougourmi tribe-the two tribes historically don’t get along.

In his heydays Muammar Gadhafi had sponsored numerous plans to topple the CIA-backed former Chadian president Hissène Habré which culminated in the 1986/7 disastrous Toyota Wars in which the two forces fought fiercely atop Toyota Hiluxes supplied by France and the US. The post 1990 Idris Deby’s regime hasn’t done a better job of strengthening institutions and rebuilding the country. He’s committing a mistake that his former northern neighbor Gadhafi had done years earlier and it had costed him his life. Outside of the capital N’Djamena, the only other semblance of civilization is the world’s scenic 18 strips Ounianga lakes in the north and the 3rd largest city of Abeche in the east.

In 1980 Chad ended up in a long running civil war, and Gadhafi in his signature style provided arms, political sanction and logistical support to the Arab Nomads rebels hiding in Eastern Libya. The Sudanese government, well aware of the repercussions of the Chadian civil war pouring across its borders, armed the Arabic-speaking Abbala nomads as a buffer in that long running insurrection. The two groups later merged to form the infamous Janjaweed. Soon enough they drifted away from Gadhafi and provided existential utility to the Khartoum government as they battled with the Christian south.

The Janjaweed in turn lost Gadhafi’s outright support as they increasingly became Khartoum’s weapon of war and supplementary military flank against southern tribes like the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa peoples. Gadhafi didn’t mind though as he had backed Sudanese strongman Sadiq Al Mahdi to assume power in Sudan in 1986 until 1989 when Omar Al Bashir took over.

In mid-August 2011 Sudanese spy chief Mohammed Atta and former president Al Bashir-who was under an international arrest warrant-left for Tripoli and met Gadhafi ostensibly to discuss ‘the means to restore peace in Darfur. 10 months later the same Khartoum would supply anti-Gadhafi rebels in the east with arms and logistical supply rerouted through southwest Egypt.

With Gadhafi gone, the arm stockpiles, battle-hardened desert tribes and latent ethnic rivalries that he had long suppressed have erupted, producing hundreds of small conflicts which were simmering for decades.

My ‘worst mistake’ is what Obama called his toppling of Gadhafi in Libya during his mid-April 2016 interview aired on Fox News. Gadhafi, for all his flaws had outfoxed many adversaries and used his Bedouin credibility and mastery of the desert power politics to navigate complex regional, political, historical and religious interests in the Sahel and just like in Libya he had ensured they were all built around his fist, flair or charisma.

His rule had been marred by the Palestinian cause, the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing, the 1988 Lorkerbie Plane Crash, the 1989 blowing up of the French UTA airliner over Niger, the 1987 alleged coup plot in Kenya, in a never-ending list of proven and purported mischief. What’s not in doubt is that his 42 years reign had an oversized impact on the local, and regional power equilibriums.

Therefore, his ouster and death in that culvert in Sirte city in October 2011 was inevitably going to create a Sahelian vacuum that set off chain reactions from eastern Senegal through a dozen countries all the way east and south of Sahara. The ensuing chaos was inevitable,. There was just no two ways about it. Former US Defense Secretary in one of his last interviews before leaving office estimated it’ll take about 30 years to quell the militant extremism unleashed post-9/11.

So the current coup in Mali, the rise of AQIM, and AQAP, and forging links with Al Shabaab, Janjaweed, Tuareg insurrection, Ansar Dine, Boko Haram and dozens of embedded militia groups are a legacy to an explosive powder keg for which Gadhafi’s death was simply the perfect fuse.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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

Follow us on Twitter. Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend?

By Darius Okolla

When Charles Bukeko attended Jogoo Road Primary School in the 1970s, it was a bastion of sporting, athletic and academic prowess in an era when the emerging Eastlands urban spaces were orderly, neat, well-tended, and provided a quality environment In which to live.

Bukeko lived in Lumumba Estate, the council estate where many civil servants lived in the 1970s and 80s, and where he developed a love for football above all else.

To be fair though, the football frenzy of the seventies had a psychological grip on the national psyche, and provided the safety valve for a nation that was still reeling from the political mistakes of the mid-to-late 60s. The Abaluhya Football Club (AFC), in particular, enjoyed a winning streak year- on-year despite the cancellation of the 1971 national league halfway into the season.

The national team, Harambee Stars, had qualified for the Nations Cup finals in 1972 and at the City Stadium, Gor Sirkal had secured a big win in 1975. At the same time Kenneth Matiba had become the Kenya Football Federation chairman. The likes of the double-foot dribbling wizard Chege Ouma, the all-rounder Jackson Aluko, and maestro Livingstone Madegwa were harassing African soccer giants Cameroon, Mali, and Togo in their qualifiers group, and setting new precedents in Kenyan football.

It was inevitable then that, Papa, who had schooled just down the road from the then Jogoo Road Stadium (now City Stadium), would give football a shot, just like many youths from Mbotela, Maringo Estate, Lumumba, Jericho and along Jogoo Road. ”I’m an ardent fan of AFC Leopards. My dad took me to the field to watch AFC Leopards when I was 4 years old,” Bukeko once remarked. This love for football, a legacy from his father, would grow through the decades and he became an ardent fan of the local leagues, while throwing his support behind clubs like Sofapaka and AFC Leopards.

Bukeko was born in Buhalarire in the central Marachi region of Mumias, in Kakamega. The eldest son of Valeria Makokha and Cosmas Wafula, Bukeko first lived in Lumumba Estate before he was transferred to Mumias School, as an unsuccessful last-ditch effort by his parents to dissuade him from focusing too much on football. He still went on to play central midfield for Mumias FC in Kakamega, Nzoia FC and Pan Paper FC in Webuye, and for Congo boys in Mombasa. It’s during his stint at the coast that he earned the name Champezi, a transliteration of champion, given to him by former president Moi’s political kingpin at the coast, the late Shariff Nassir.

Bukeko eventually hang his boots and exchanged the sea and football for a life back in Nairobi, moving to a house in Uhuru Estate next to Kisimenti Building, and right around the corner from where he grew up in Lumumba Estate. Neighbours describe him as an affable man who took over the estate’s security affairs in the 1990s as crime rates rose in tandem with the negative economic impact of the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the early 90s. Together with his wife Beatrice Ebbie Andega, Bukeko had three children – Anthony, born in 2006, Charlie in 2007 and Wendy in 2009. He was also man of quiet faith, an ardent teacher of the scriptures and a church leader.

Bukeko stumbled onto the stage by sheer fate when working as a halls custodian at the University of Nairobi; the set of a theatre play that his friend was staging, fell apart, the actors bailed out and Bukeko stepped in and saved the day. That act in the late 1990s marked his first appearance at the Kenya National Theatre and sparked a flame that became a burning ambition. His friend Patrick Kanyeki recalls Bukeko’s laser-focused, borderline obsessive approach to acting; Papa would write his own scripts, master and rehearse his lines and start his morning trek into the city so that he would arrive at the KNT early in the day.

And so, long before he became Papa Shirandula, Charles Bukeko had established a name for himself at the Kenya National Theatre, working in the late 1990s and early 2000s alongside the likes of David Kinyua, Ben Kivuitu, Fred Muriithi, Patrick Kanyeki and Peter Mudamba, under Pambazuka Productions. He later moved to the French Cultural Centre to work alongside such emerging young talents as Nice Githinji and Shiko Mburu.

Bukeko’s first big break came when he acted in playwright JPR Ochieng’ Odero’s The Film Doesn’t Film, earning Sh30,000 for a minor role at a time when cast members regularly took home Sh300 at the day’s end.

The veteran ecologist and thespian Ochieng’ Odero would become Bukeko’s first director before he moved on to the Phoenix Theatre and met producer Ian Mbugua, the man who introduced him to the legendary Scottish ex-serviceman and sailor-turned-thespian, James Falkland. Falkland, had just founded Phoenix Theatre with his partner Debonnaire. Bukeko spent the next three years at the Phoenix working with Falkland and his friends James Ward and Kenneth Mason. It was also around this time that he started putting together his own shows under Mbalamwezi Productions in collaboration with producer Peter Mudamba. Faces for TV

Enter the celebrated filmmaker Bob Nyanja of Cinematic Solutions who had been a literature undergraduate at the University of Nairobi when Bukeko was employed there as a Halls custodian. Bob had returned from South Carolina with a Master of Fine Arts in film in the late 90s ready to transition Kenya’s stuttering creative arts onto the screens.

Nyanja first featured Bukeko as a night guard in the 2007 film Malooned! in which Peter Ndambuki aka Churchill played the role of a street urchin. “We walked all over town looking for a guard’s uniform that would fit Papa”, Nyanja remarked in a tribute to Bukeko. Bob Nyanja was also the muscle behind the massive TV comedy hit Redykulass.

It was during the opening of Malooned! at the Junction Mall that Royal Media Services director Wachira Waruru proposed the idea of expanding the role of the guard into a television series. Bukeko, sensing the opportunity to do something remarkable, wrote the first scripts of what went on to become this hugely successful show, and Papa Shirandula was born.

There was a visionary zeal to try out new programming for local audiences in the mid-2000s pioneered by Wachira Waruru, Bob Nyanja, Catherine Wamuyu and a band of local directors, filmmakers and producers. This risk-taking paid off and released a tide of relatable content that beat back the dominance of foreign soap operas.

For Bukeko, Papa Shirandula was the culmination of nearly 12 years of stage productions at the Kenya National Theatre, Braeburn Theatre, Phoenix Theatre, and dozens of screen productions. When asked about his big breaks Papa remarked, “My breakout role was when I was cast as Herod for the play, Nativity at the Braeburn Theatre”.

The name Shirandula is made up of the Wanga word khurandula which loosely translates as tenacity. It’s clear why Bukeko would go for that moniker given his own personality. The name’s resonance with the public also spoke to his impressive ability to transform seemingly mundane acts and phrases into social currency.

As a thespian, Bukeko embodied a dogged determination and constantly decried the youth’s desire for quick success. While he often spoke about the urban youth’s predicaments, he also didn’t shy away from criticising their impatience and the effect it had on their young budding careers. As a testament of his belief in the youth, Bukeko, now Shirandula, was the first guest at the Churchill Show set up by his contemporary Peter Ndambuki to show-case emerging talent.

His own show, Papa Shirandula, fed into the emerging classist posture of Kenya’s viewership at a point where Mexican soaps like La Mujer De Lorenzo, Cuando Seas Mia, the South African TV series Reflections, and Asian acts like Kyunki and Kahaani had dominated the screens. By the early to mid-2000s, the Vioja Mahakamani, Vitimbi, Sokomoko and Tausi had long been edged out, while the Boomba Train youth culture of the early 2000s, was demanding for a yet-to-be figured out screenplays.

At the outset, Papa Shirandula’s viewership was limited to its blue-collar origins and brand but soon developed crosscutting audience appeal, partly because of Bukeko’s performance where his persona and his alter-ego blended deeply as both fed off each other. On screen, Bukeko would give way to Papa Shirandula, this security guard who had three wives and a white girlfriend and who manages to hide his true profession from them all. Bukeko seamlessly morphed into Papa Shirandula, a burly guard in a red uniform; an impostor who sustained his double life as a patriarch, polygamist, elder, doting father, and scheming character across a series that ran for 13 years. As Kazungu Matano (Captain Otoyo) recalls, outside his inner circles, Papa’s weight was a sensitive topic and something he privately admitted to struggling with and, indeed, the 1990s build of an athletic man had changed drastically as the years progressed.

In South Africa, Papa was well known through the viral Vodacom ad in which he played the role of a dictator, evoking the role of Joseph Olita, the man from K’ogelo who had played Amin in The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin (1981). The ad is hilarious, comical and very relatable across the continent, a feat only matched by his signature Brrrrrr! moment in the 2007 global Coca Cola advert. Papa went on to feature in the internationally acclaimed Fernando Meirelles book-to-film adaptation, The Constant Gardener (2005), in Malooned! (2007), and in The Captain of Nakara (2012).

The Cultural Phenomenon

In losing Shirandula we have lost something more than a thespian of great prowess and an industry trailblazer. He also mainstreamed a kind of Kenyan blue-collar masculinity which previously had little representation in our popular imagination, where the preacher and the politician are the epitome of masculinity. Out of these two flow all the sub-archetypes that dominate the public imagination of what it means to be a Kenyan man and, therefore, Shirandula’s blue-collar, masculine sub-archetype rarely received the kind of visibility that a lot of other urban sub-archetypes in this country do.

And so, throughout the 80s and 90s, we see a masculinity where the man would comfortably live in the tea estates of Kericho, or Kaloleni—as Marjorie Oludhe chronicled in Coming To Birth —while his family lived on the land in Whisero, or Kanyadhiang. Guess who had done that decades earlier?

Bukeko played into the paradoxical stereotype of the Luhya man as a potbellied guard which fits a little too well with the all too familiar portrayal of Luhyas as dominating the private security sector, Kalenjins the police, Luos the handicrafts sector, Kikuyus trade, and Kambas as loyal civil servants and juniors to Asian bosses.

Ethnic stereotypes range from the funny to the downright disrespectful; a trope which papa had to fight as he exemplified the stigma associated with the job of a security guard. Shirandula gently managed to almost single-handedly give voice, representation, and nuance to the talented, pragmatic, modest, blue-collar masculine sub-archetypes that work in the shadows of capital and its structures. He explored the struggles of that type of man to fit in, the black tax that those men paid, and their complicated relationship with the Juma Andersons (his boss) of capitalist racketeering.

Papa made the careers of many along the way, famous of them all Felix Odiwuor (Jalango), his counterpart, Kazungu Matano (Otoyo), Papa’s onscreen wife Jackie Nyaminde (Wilbroda), Daisy Odeko (Naliaka), William Juma (Juma Anderson), Jackie Vike (Awinja) and Kenneth Gichoya (Njoro), all of whom have also had significant success on radio, on YouTube, as MCs and as comedians.

So when the news of his demise reached the Kenyan newsrooms, a strong sense of loss engulfed the public, a rare occurrence in this age of post-humous flagellations. We haven’t just lost Bukeko, we’ve lost Shirandula, the embodiment of the work ethic of the blue-collar worker, his tenuous relationship with the city—the tough underbelly of capital—and his struggle for dignity and identity.

In a country where the most dominant masculine sub-archetypes are inadvertently generated by the idealized preacher and the politician, Shirandula succeeded in giving voice and nuance to a whole masculine sub-archetype, and to working-class families, and that’s no mean feat. Go well Charles Bukeko. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend?

By Darius Okolla

In June 2018, Kenya’s food and beverage import bill crossed the psychological 100 billion mark, underscoring the country’s overreliance on food imports for sustenance. This isn’t news to those in the agriculture sector who recently witnessed our diplomatic kerfuffle with Tanzania degenerate into a blockade that dented food imports and spiked the price of produce in the local market. Kenya imports onions and oranges from Tanzania; eggs, tomatoes, and pineapples from Uganda; poultry products from the United States; as well as fish and garlic from China. This kind of skewed dependency on imports strains an already dysfunctional agricultural supply chain that has atrophied and shrunk over the decades, thanks to mismanagement, theft and a lax policy environment. The agriculture sector, despite its potential, has been the victim of legislative failures, beginning with the decimation of parastatals in the Ministry of Agriculture in the 1990s, and the consolidation of state functions in ways that were incongruent with the needs of the respective agriculture sub-sectors.

The litany of social and economic ills that result from this laxity stretches long – from local farmers to reduced earnings in state coffers, disadvantaged agro-processors, heightened pressure on the shilling and import shock risks.

Kenya’s agriculture sector employs more than 50 per cent of the labour force, accounts for 34.1 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and yet only contributes Sh23.3 billion to state coffers. The growing of crops and animal production combined account for 31.8 per cent of GDP, while support activities account for 0.5 per cent.

However, a weak regulatory environment, lax enforcement, brazen importers who gang up with state operatives to bring in cheap agro-imports, and depressed prices that have precipitated a significant decline in acreage under farming have negatively impacted the sector. The resulting drop in local supply, coupled with low yields and erratic rain models, have since produced critical shortages such as the ones that hit maize supplies in 2018.

Hence, while competing countries have been regulating their agro-industries, modernising their agro-supply chains, firming up the value chain, and managing the market to control prices, Kenya’s unofficial policy has been one of irascible cartelism, fueled by a few powerful industry players both on the regulatory and market side, who seek to cash in on their connections to state powers.

It also hasn’t also been helpful that in recent years, cash crop farming has monopolised acreage at the expense of other crops. Additionally, the top foods consumed in Kenya constitute milk, maize, wheat, vegetables, potatoes and bananas, which are easier to produce under mechanised farms controlled by a few oligopolies. The end result is loss of agency by the consumer and a patent inability to determine what ends up on a typical Kenyan dinner table.

Kenya’s agriculture sector employs more than 50 per cent of the labour force, accounts for 34.1 per cent of GDP and yet only contributes Sh23.3 billion to state coffers. The growing of crops and animal production combined account for 31.8 per cent of GDP, while support activities account for 0.5 per cent.

This marks the genesis of the cycle that has ensured that Kenyans are vulnerable to the certain kind of food protectionism and nationalism, such as the recent border shutdown by Uganda to truckers and Tanzanians due to a diplomatic tussle that saw food prices spike in the country. While Kenyans made fun of Mexican maize imports, Ugandan ginger, and tomato shortages, underneath that satire lay the profound vulnerability of Kenya’s 50 million tummies to the whims and impulses of random policy makers in countries hundreds of miles from our borders.

If the current food protectionism has taught us anything, it is that food has to become a national security issue and should be accorded the respective policy and structural and supply chain securitisation needed to forestall potential starvation. The global picture

In March 2020, Vietnam and China stopped rice exports. Russia and Kazakhstan followed suit and briefly banned wheat exports. Around the world, two dozen nations took the cue and started hoarding their primary food exports in false anticipation of global shortages amidst the unrelenting COVID-19 pandemic. In total, seventeen major food supply nations placed some form of constraint on agricultural exports in the early weeks of the pandemic. Luckily, speculative behavior in agricultural commodity markets and imposing unnecessary trade restrictions, didn’t trigger food price spikes similar to those in 2007-8. The respective states almost immediately rescinded on the move amidst piling pressure and global economy concerns since the protectionism didn’t bode well for global supply chains and consumers around the world.

In recent years, we’ve increasingly gotten accustomed to the geography and ethnicity of food: that tea is British, coffee is Kenyan; tomatoes and onions are Tanzanian; ginger and bananas are Ugandan; strawberries are South African and Egyptian; fish and garlic are Chinese, poultry is from the United States; maize is from Mexico; and butter comes from South Africa. While this may portend well for global culinary multiculturalism, in times of pandemics such as this, the nationalistic fervour and export disruption exposes us to the vagaries of shortages on the shelves, potential hoarding, and hiked prices.

In recent years, the international food system has been built around the capacity of certain countries to specialise in the production of some foods to feed demand in other countries, while importing food items that could not be efficiently produced locally. This has produced a complex cog of farmers, transporters, financiers, and distributors spread across all corners of the globe. In this system, the world has become highly dependent on a globalised production chain in which dozens of countries straddle the middle of this chain, each adding a new component to the final agro-product. Take the US for example, whose imports account for half of the fresh fruits, a third of the vegetables, and 90 per cent of the seafood consumed in the country.

Food nationalism sometimes gets politicised around origins, such as whether falafel originated in the Mediterranean or in the Middle East, or whether rice from Vietnam is better than rice from Pakistan. In some jurisdictions, this has taken the form of policy protectionism, such as the European Union (EU)’s Protected Geographical Status framework that limits the production of certain potato, tequila, vinegar and cheese varieties to certain regions under specified conditions.

In recent years, the international food system has been built around the capacity of certain countries to specialise in the production of some foods to feed demand in other countries, while importing food items that could not be efficiently produced locally. This has produced a complex cog of farmers, transporters, financiers, and distributors spread across all corners of the globe.

Luckily it isn’t only the exoticism of certain foods that drive food nationalisms; even the working classes in recent years have expressed their concerns through political dissent driven by food: Sudan’s 2018 Bread Revolution, Kenya’s 2011 Unga Revolution, Egypt’s 2017 Wheat Revolution, the French Milk Farmers’ Revolution, among a host of other displeasures with the volatility of the national food basket.

Food sub-nationalism

Within gastro-nationalism there exists local nuance that drives certain protectionisms too. Nyandarua produces 35 per cent of our national potato output. Cashewnuts come from Kilifi. Mwea and Ahero produce rice. Flowers are grown in Naivasha. Vegetables come from the Kisii highlands. Maize is from Kitale. Freshwater fish is from Kisumu. Sisal is from Taveta. Milk comes from Githunguri. Tea comes from the Nandi region.

The March 26th shutdown of Nairobi, Mombasa, Kilifi and Kwale counties disrupted huge markets that are the purveyors and outlets for these agriproducts. Because of claims of corruption at police barriers along these counties’ borders, rural farmers effectively reduced their supply of farm products, sending the prices of food sky high in urban neighbourhoods.

Barriers erected to contain in-country COVID infection rates have, in turn, created logistical bottlenecks that reduce the supply of basic food commodities, creating an overcapacity in the producing counties while precipitating shortages in urban agricultural markets, such as Kondele and Kibuye in Kisumu, Mwembe Tayari and Kongowea in Mombasa, Soko Mjinga in Kitale, Marikiti in Nairobi, Daraja Mbili in Kisii county, Kagio in Kirinyaga and similar large food markets spread across Kenyan urban centres.

This chokes a critical cog of an already disadvantaged food infrastructure, given that there is an annual demand for 4.5 million tonnes of maize, 2 million tonnes of wheat, 1.3 million tonnes of sugar and 0.7 million tonnes of rice, which is barely met by local production. This deficit is often filled by the import of 1.3 million tonnes of maize, 1.8 million tonnes of wheat and 625,000 tonnes of rice. The overall outlay of Kenya’s food system, therefore, is a combination of disempowered (mostly urban) eaters, powerful agro-cartels who chase higher margins through unregulated food imports, and traders who, as a result of overreliance on imports, have reoriented their supply chains.

Food capitalism

Ironically, hoarding and food nationalism hit amidst a global sufficiency and oversupply mainly driven by China’s and India’s massive investment in grain production, and investments in agriculture in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Canada, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Overall, less than 25 countries in the world are global net exporters though many in South America, Eastern Europe and South East Asia range between food sufficient and stable exporters.

The world’s poor are bearing the brunt of this, thanks to their poor storage capacities as well as the fact that they often merely make up the unskilled labour needed within the global food supply systems. Britain, a key importer and exporter, had to rely on the importation of labour as a deficit of 90,000 workers had left fruit farms unattended, thus heightening the possibility of farm losses. Britain was forced to seek nearly 10,000 workers from EU and non-EU countries, which remained closed during the height of the pandemic.

Cross-border supply chains and the free movement of consumer goods have increasingly been subjected to unfair trade subsidies, consumer protectionism, and border logistical bottlenecks that reduce the flow of consumer foodstuffs. Surprisingly the hoarding happens just when, unlike previous periods of rampant food inflation, global inventories of staple crops like corn, wheat, soybeans and rice are plentiful.

Food nationalism feeds a strain of food capitalism that sees approximately 1.5 billion tonnes of food wasted globally even as the COVID pandemic impacts food production and supply and guts distribution. Meanwhile, 2020 estimates are that due to the pandemic, a billion people face starvation globally and suffer from some form of hunger brought about by war, climate change, or simply a lack of means, especially in the Global South, while 300 million are at a crisis point.

It’s a testament to the global architecture of hunger that the majority of those in need are in the Global South, partly due to conflicts and climate disasters, but also predominantly due to economic instability that hampers both physical and economic access to food. Resource-rich nations in Africa, Latin America and Asia get stunted by unfair global practices, disastrous political systems propped up by and from the West, and predatory firms from both the East and the West who loot these countries through tax havens and illicit financial flows.

Hence, the food systems across the Global South are impoverished through laxity and political interference, while critical capital that could boost agri-production gets siphoned to the Global North. The resultant losses and deficit are what precipitate the vulnerability and susceptibility to shocks, such as that which has been wrought by the current pandemic.

Culinary identities

While food nationalism entrenches a protectionist model that compromises the legal and political rules of global trade espoused by many treaties and pacts, culinary nationalism simply raises the pride in a country’s culinary history. Large swathes of societies are having to rediscover their comparative advantages as the imports from farmers halfway around the world grind to a halt.

The coronavirus strain and its disruption of supply and value chains has simply fed into a hand- wringing method of protectionism quietly accepted and sometimes loudly proclaimed by belligerents like Donald Trump. This localisation inadvertently provides a perfect cover for those who have long embraced the idea of nationalism.

Food nationalism feeds a strain of food capitalism that sees approximately 1.5 billion tonnes of food wasted globally even as the COVID pandemic impacts food production and supply and guts distribution. Meanwhile, 2020 estimates are that due to the pandemic, a billion people face starvation globally and suffer from some form of hunger…

Even so, the pandemic has also necessitated the closure of some plants, resulted in bankruptcy among some agro-producers, and slowed down processing plants in India, in parts of China, in the United States and Canada, across Brazil, and in Western Europe. On the upside, this has helped citizens to audit the resilience of their local food systems and their capacity to feed people over the long haul.

Grounding of flights and border restrictions have limited the flow of migrant workers to farms that rely on hired labour during the growing and harvest seasons. Meanwhile, wars have decimated grain research centres in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, while coercive legislation is being pushed in certain African countries even as there is criticism of the “NGO-isation” of agriculture in Africa and the push for legislated monopoly on seeds in countries like Kenya and India.

The global food infrastructure in the entire farm-to-plate conveyor belt and the related value chain industries and their support industries are staring at a significant disruption that will overhaul certain sectors, expand others, neuter many, and rejig the wider global reserves, primary producers and suppliers.

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This article is part of The Elephant Food Edition Series done in collaboration with Route to Food Initiative (RTFI). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend?

By Darius Okolla

“In wartime, truth is so precious that it should be attended to by a pack of lies.” –Winston Churchill

We’re at the centre of a COVID-19 global pandemic where fears of infection, shutdowns and job losses abound. COVID-19 is proving to be a far-reaching virus that is impacting economies, medical facilities, and cultural and religious events. It has infected everything, from supply chains to airlines, and everyone, from the young to the old. No one has survived its impact unscathed.

Still, packed amidst its sweeping global consequences are nuanced racial, medical, and primarily editorial repercussions that differ regionally in scale, scope, intensity and implications.

The global media ecosystems – always adept at popularising poverty frames to largely Western audiences – haven’t been able to hide their biases. Despite being disrupted by the new media models, these giant media outlets often act as spin machines, ready to be deployed in the service of their funders to perpetuate racial stereotypes.

Their controvertible views include: allegedly canceling the Olympics because of COVID-19 in Africa, despite Europe being the worst hit; a sharp focus on Africa’s own xenophobia, as well as corona’s class and race problems; how inequalities get exacerbated by this global virus; and why Africa not as badly hit as the rest of the world.

World Health Organization (WHO) director, the Ethiopian medic Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has stated that these editorial models perpetuate stigmas that hamper global cooperation to fight the virus. Meanwhile, Africa’s media platforms, we’re told, don’t seem to clearly understand the cloak-and-dagger war of perception being waged online

Kenya-born Prof. Thumbi Ndung’u, the director of Durban’s Infectious Disease Research Centre, added nuance to this conundrum during an interview with eNCA when he stated: “I don’t think anybody knows why Africa so far appears to have been just slightly impacted. There isn’t much travel to that part of China (Wuhan) from Africa, or it could just be a coincidence. Curiously Africa’s highest infections have come from Europe and America.”

This editorial slant is getting buttressed by accusations of continent-wide editorial sloppiness in the COVID-19 coverage by key stakeholders in the African media landscape. Journalism lecturer George Ogola stated, “My fear is that Africa’s news media is abdicating its responsibilities by not questioning the appropriateness of the global response to the crisis. It is failing to address practical, historical, cultural and political questions around the interventions aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19.”

The politics of pandemics

What the extended list of outlets that constitute the Western media patently ignore is the decades- long debate regarding epidemiological definitions. The epistemological definitions of outbreaks, how they morph into epidemics, and cross the threshold of pandemics, carries with them consequentially different meanings for the political bureaucracy, for scientific medical experts, and for the public.

In recent decades, the common lists of infectious outbreaks seem manifestly skewed towards the geographical Global South. The 2002 SARS, the 2015 ZIKA, and the 2014 Ebola belong to the famous list of deadly and highly infectious diseases. Excluded from the list are American Influenza, French Gastro, the resurgent British “Dickensian diseases”, Scarlett disease and whooping cough, and Germany’s carbapenem-resistant pathogens epidemics.

COVID-19’s global ramifications have reignited a culinary culture war, with 60 Minutes-Australia, Vox, NBC and VICE incessantly harping on unusual Asian culinary diets and the prevalence of animal-to-human disease transmission.

“My fear is that Africa’s news media is abdicating its responsibilities by not questioning the appropriateness of the global response to the crisis. It is failing to address practical, historical, cultural and political questions around the interventions aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19.”

No doubt the causal links between bats and COVID-19, swines and H1N1, birds and Avian Flu, and Ebola and monkeys have been documented as examples of potential zoonosis transmission. However, within these paradigms, Asian and African culinary anthropology often gets bandied around with primitive connotations, never mind that equally strange foods like French Andouillette (pork and intestine sausage, much like the Kenyan mutura), Spanish goose barnacles, Finnish Blodplättar (blood pancakes) and dozens of other unusual foods are linked to wet markets.

Many point to the Huanan wet market in Wuhan province as the ground zero for COVID-19. Thanks to that highly contentious and largely unverified belief, wet markets are increasingly portrayed as the chaotic emblems of Chinese – and by extension, Oriental – culinary weirdness. The New York Times made reference to Chinese omnivorous markets that make perfect incubators of so-called novel pathogens’ even while eventually acknowledging that “the exact path of the pathogen had not yet been established”.

Epidemics and patient 31s

Africa’s healthcare infrastructure, which has been ill-equipped and chronically underfunded for decades, has consistently failed to decisively eradicate even simple ailments, and has been subject of incessant concern as regards its capacity to handle epidemics or pandemics of this magnitude.

Surprisingly, reading through the 2019 Global Health Security Index, it’s interesting that the least prepared countries outside of Africa are in the Caribbean and along the US southern borders, while Britain, Italy, and Spain, which are ranked among the most prepared (marked yellow), are some of the worst hit by COVID-19. Curiously, the latter’s preparedness seems more astute towards everyday ailments than pandemics. China, Cuba, Vietnam and India (the medical mecca) are somewhat, but not fully, prepared, but they are the ones who’ve dealt with the actual pandemic crisis pretty well.

As Kenyan anti-corruption crusader John Githongo notes, the measure of Euro- American preparedness has been hardware and not software; it is systems, not anthropology. The US, Italy, Spain, and the UK, despite their developed world status, have displayed a software (leadership) failure. In some cases, their politicians have been an essential part of the problem due to poor messaging and a trust deficit on the part of leaders like Donald Trump and the ailing Boris Johnson. The same tendencies are witnessed in Brazil, Uganda, Hungary, Philippines, and Kenya.

In East Africa, Tanzanian president John Magufuli approved church and mosque gatherings, ostensibly to allow Tanzanians to pray for a cure, while neighbouring Kenya banned all religious gatherings as soon as confirmed cases were reported (in line with its “social distancing” directive). The Korean religious super-spreader (dubbed patient 31) has elicited an even sharper focus on religion and its largely negative perception across the popular culture. The religious congregated in large numbers in Bangladesh, South Korea, and Australia.

As Kenyan anti-corruption crusader John Githongo notes, the measure of Euro- American preparedness has been hardware and not software; it is systems, not anthropology. The US, Italy, Spain, and the UK, despite their developed world status, have displayed a software (leadership) failure. The generational dimension has featured in the narrative war, with millennials criticised for what has been described as their reckless attitudes to the pandemic. In America, young college students threw caution to the wind and went to Miami, Florida for their spring break vacation.

Disaster capitalism and middle class insularity

The middle and upper classes in Kenya have advocated for official Level 2 and 3 shutdowns, which will reduce societal functions to a bare minimum. This elitist self-preservation has elicited sharp class wars that are playing out in online circles. Panic buying, overfilled trollies and weird shopping models aping Western doomsday preppers have been the subject of scorn, exasperation, and mockery.

Working class communities, and those in the informal sector, who constitute those dependent on daily wages, view the lockdown as insensitive classist machinations of out-of-touch leaders motivated by self-seeking middle class types. It doesn’t help that, for the most part, the middle and upper classes monopolise popular voices and cultural production, including crystal ball predictions in social and digital spaces.

In this moment of global crisis, there has been little talk about the pandemic bond facility that was put together for poor countries battling epidemics. This facility, established in the aftermath of the Ebola crisis, seems not to have anticipated that the epicentre of the next pandemic would be within functional economics with strong safety nets and pretty robust fiscal and monetary policies. The bond, therefore, has become a lifeline for undisciplined regimes with tattered and often undefined development trajectories.

The lenders get their geopolitical influence through the cash, and tenders for medical supplies. Artificial food shortages create an elitist stranglehold on the state and society. Renowned author Naomi Klein has talked at length about the ensuing debate regarding the intrusion of hedge funds into healthcare sectors in what’s increasingly becoming a marketisation of this tragedy through corona capitalism.

Multipolarity or leaderless humanity?

COVID-19, more than anything, has exposed the make-believe superpower status of the Euro- American enterprise. Donald Trump has adopted an insular “America first” policy at a point where many had gotten used to a post-Cold War unipolar American hegemony. Trump has insisted on calling COVID-19 the Chinese flu, while an unnamed White House official referred to it as kung-flu.

The world is unraveling at a point where no single political leader or country seems able to marshal the political might needed to steer 21st century leadership. To be fair, the complexity of modern-day geopolitical maneuvering wouldn’t allow for a single power leadership. The multiplicity of challenges unleashed by a single pandemic carry with them massive implications that would easily outweigh the vibrancy of any single hegemony irrespective of its sheer size, industrial capacity or geopolitical capital.

In this moment of global crisis, there has been little talk about the pandemic bond facility that was put together for poor countries battling epidemics. This facility, established in the aftermath of the Ebola crisis, seems not to have anticipated that the epicentre of the next pandemic would be within functional economics with strong safety nets… Surprisingly China, Cuba, Russia, Vietnam and a raft of other nations placed on the infamy list by the Euro-American system seem to have waged the pandemic war well. It’s of curious interest then that Western nations have been quick to applaud Taiwan and Singapore’s response (and rightfully so) while ignoring Cubans, who’ve sent large medical teams abroad and who notably took in a British cruise ship rejected by the US.

China, it is said, went into draconian default mode: shutting down whole cities, breaking into homes to feed stranded pets, and displaying a level of statecraft efficiency only achievable in highly controlled bureaucratic societies.

Another type of Cold War

Meanwhile, the Russians have stuck to the idea that the virus originated in the US and have subsequently accused the US of being behind the more contagious and viral strain of the flu. This is after America recorded its worst flu season just before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Chinese authorities claimed that the COVID-19 virus could be a strain that evolved from the Americans during the October 2019 Wuhan Military Games. Their basic argument is that the medical authorities pursued their analysis through 100 genome samples drawn from 12 countries, which must have been prompted by an undisclosed yet compelling reason to be searching for the original source of COVID-19 outside China.

Chinese specialist Zhong Nanshan said on January 27, “Though the COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China…it originated someplace else, in another country.”

That clever sophistry bolsters the Chinese narrative, given that on February 14, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that they would begin testing individuals with influenza- like-illness for the novel coronavirus at public health labs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and New York City.

It doesn’t help that this has been a particularly bad flu season in the US. Though not the worst ever, the CDC employee and epidemiologist, Dr. Emily Martin (PhD), remarked that “it started very early this year”.

This was just few months after the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, located on Fort Detrick, Maryland, was controversially shut down in July 2019 due to biosafety lapses. Two months after shutting down that facility, the US Centre for Health Security simulated a coronavirus type pandemic dubbed Event 201 and its implications across borders, an exercise that further complicated the media war in an era of fear and conspiracies.

Iran, which has had to contend with the January downing of the Ukrainian airliner that killed 176 people, and the death of Qasem Soleimani, its key military and diplomatic leader, has also been badly hit by the COVID-19 scourge. Its 60,500 infections as of April 4th placed it at the top 10 highest infection rates in the world. Iran is spinning the theory that the pandemic crisis is a biological weapon created by Washington labs. It is also blaming international sanctions for the country’s inability to provide critical emergency medical interventions that would have helped curb the spread of the virus.

Afghanistan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Lebanon blame their mishandling of the initial infections as the reason for the spread in the region. Chinese specialist Zhong Nanshan said on January 27, “Though the COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China…it originated someplace else, in another country.”

Surprisingly, for such a deeply complex region fraught with radical factionalism, sectarianism, and ideological strife, the pandemic has lowered chronic violence as war resources are diverted to fight the mass infections. Coupled with falling oil prices, the region’s countries’ blame game may not hold for long, given that their best PR spins have to be directed, not towards global perceptions, but aimed at their economically strained citizens.

Further south, Africa has thus far confidently braced itself for the COVID-19 pandemic in the face of inadequate healthcare infrastructure. One wonders whether the low numbers of confirmed cases are a hiatus before the storm or a fact of racial differences, genetic resistance or that Africa commands merely 2% of global air traffic. Of note is the age-old fact that pandemics that start outside Africa rarely make an impact here.

Kenya’s selection of seasoned bureaucrat and PR guru Mutahi Kagwe to manage the health ministry has paid dividends in an otherwise scandal-prone and largely dysfunctional regime. His astute management of public perception, with a media savviness not always associated with the regime stalwarts, has earned him accolades in certain quarters and the hard-wrought scepticism of others.

The image war in relation to COVID-19, which is primarily being fought through mainstream media, popular blogs, digital platforms and grapevines, remains one of the sharpest points of contention in the fight against the global pandemic.

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Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend? By Darius Okolla

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” – Honore de Balzac

It is 1848. The Scottish botanist Robert Fortune has transitioned from the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, Scotland, to the prestigious Horticultural Society of London. Fortune’s fascinating memoir of his first trip to China’s richly biodiverse and scenic Wu Yi highlands has got the ears of London’s nobility, particularly now that China, an imperial power in the East, hoards tea seedlings and tea technology. The status-chasing British elite remain infatuated by tea as an upper class beverage since it was introduced to Victorian high society as a cultural fad by the Portuguese royalty Catherine of Braganza.

As Sara Rose would later recount in How England Stole the World’s Favourite Drink and Changed History, Fortune was approached by a representative of the East India Trading Company to smuggle tea seedlings, Chinese tea experts and tea technology out of China into British-controlled India. The theft would become the most critical economic espionage of the 19th century and would effectively shift the global centre of economic power from the East to the West for the next 130 years. (China wouldn’t recover until the late 1970s.)

Stealing technology as a model for growing economically isn’t just a distinctly British trait. In 1258, as the 13th century Islamic scholars Al-Tabari and Ibn al-Nadim would recount, intellectual property exports were fueled by what’s now known as the Translation Movement of the late 800s AD. The project saw much of the Greek Hellenistic intellectual, economic and commercial capital translated into Arabic, a move that partly aided the rise of the Islamic Golden Age from the 12th to the 15th century. Done under the guise of integrating the large Greek-speaking populations into the expanding Islamic kingdoms, the translations helped chronicle the contributions of Greeks, Indians, and Persians to science, mathematics, trade, and philosophy.

Stealing technology as a model for growing economically isn’t just a distinctly British trait. In 1258, as the 13th century Islamic scholars Al-Tabari and Ibn al-Nadim would recount, intellectual property exports were fueled by what’s now known as the Translation Movement of the late 800s AD. Beginning in the 600s AD, the Islamic Umayyad Empire swayed more towards militaristic conquest which, while broadening its borders, brought into its fold numerous disparate groups speaking different languages. The Abbasid Empire that followed after in the 800s benefited from the intellectual curiosity of the Buddhist-Iranian Royal Islamic family, the Barmakids, whose translation efforts rendered much of the ancient scholarly work into the Arabic language and nuances.

Soon enough the Arabic translations plus the resultant Islamic innovations made their way to Christian Europe via Sicily, Andalusia in the Mediterranean, Toledo in Spain and Venice in Italy. This Islamic conquest of Europe precipitated a Norman-Arab-Indo-Byzantium culture through which Eastern ideas seeped their way West via trade, wars and industrial espionage. This contradicts long- time Harvard professor and political scientist Samuel Huntington’s claim in the Clash of Civilizations that Islam and the West have always been incompatible and fundamentally opposed to each other.

Venice, the glassmaking capital of the ancient world, grew its commercial stature on the back of the industrial skills found in those translated texts in the Byzantium Empire and the Orient. The Venetians, well aware that industrial espionage fuels the rise or fall of nations, in 1295 passed a Venetian law that banned foreigners from learning the skill and also forbade its most skilled craftsmen from traveling out of the city. They’d go as far as locking them up in the Venetian island of Murano from which we get the legend of Murano glassmaking that has lasted till date.

However, in 1612, a Florentine priest and chemist, Antonio Neri, published his seminal work, L’artra Vetraria (The Art of Glass) that revealed industrial glassmaking secrets and made them accessible to the wider public and foreigners. Over time, the Bohemian Kingdom in the westerly region of the Czech Republic stole the glassmaking technology and so did the French.

The Victorian aristocracy not only swindled industrial tea technology from China to India, it would also loot the Indian subcontinent through the Raj colonial rule. As recounted by former United Nations diplomat Shashi Tharoor in his work Inglorious Empire, under British colonial theft, India’s share of global manufacturing fell from 27 per cent to 2 per cent.

Keep in mind that as British macroeconomist, the late Angus Maddison, had calculated, in the 1800s, China and India together accounted for 52 per cent of global trade. Colonial theft, industrial-scale looting and loss of trade secrets to Euro-American imperial powers brought these two giants to their knees.

How nations prosper

Conventional textbook wisdom dictates that the path of nations to prosperity is dependent on a multitude of variables, key among them being democracy, managed bureaucracy, equitable taxes, property rights, the size of the (in)formal sectors, and the inclusivity of the economy.

Controversial British social historian Niall Ferguson credits what he calls the six killer apps of Western civilization – competition, science, a property-owning democracy, modern medicine, a consumer society, and the Protestant work ethic – as the engines of Euromerican economic power.

Meanwhile, Coolidge lecturer and professor of economics emeritus David Landes credits Western values, primarily hard work, the advancement of scientific knowledge, and a passion for progress, as the keys to a nation’s success. In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, he makes a treatise for the role of markets and governments, with Landes preferring a statecraft built to intervene only when necessary but one that mostly leaves the nation-state to the power of the markets for good and for ill. In the 1800s, China and India together accounted for 52 per cent of global trade. Colonial theft, industrial-scale looting and loss of trade secrets to Euro-American imperial powers brought these two giants to their knees.

Christian historian Russell Kirk follows the path of divine discipline, his central claim being that culture itself descends from cult or religion. It’s his belief in Civilization Without a Religion that metaphysics makes it possible to establish basic set of common values out of which emerges public trust that makes greater cooperation and progress possible. Hence out of metaphysics emerges physics from which cultures grow into civilizations. This, he believed, is what gave rise to Western civilization as we know it, traced mostly to the Protestant Reformation of the 1600s when Martin Luther rebelled against the Catholic Church.

Back at the British Empire, if they imagined themselves as unique in the long chain of global industrial theft, then history awaited them. In 1791, as America’s 13 colonies emerged out of the American Revolution, Pennsylvanian economist Tench Coxe and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton were convinced that the only way the young colony could grow was through the age-old route of empire-building industrial tech theft.

In 1787, the American agent Andrew Mitchell had been intercepted by British authorities as he was trying to smuggle new British models and drawings of the latest industrial machines and technology to the US. He fled to Denmark to escape capture. The mission had been funded by Coxe, Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s friend, who’d also go on to encourage George Parkinson to steal the textile spinning machine from Britain. Massachusetts businessman Francis Cabot Lowell too pilfered the automated cloth-weaving designs and later established the massive American textile industrial town of Lowell, which is named after him.

From its inception, America encouraged immigrating foreigners, private citizens, state officers, and travelling traders to smuggle in industrial designs, drawings, and European innovation to aid in state-building. America pursued contradictory paths in which it incentivised industrial espionage and theft abroad while firming up intellectual property rights and protecting innovations at home.

Historian Doron Ben-Altar portrays America’s Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s ambition as an enabler in what he describes in Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power as “unabashed, state-sanctioned flouting of British law”. America at inception fits the model of a den of rogue economic hitmen and intellectual pirates.

The country’s list of bootlegging and contraband capitalism, as portrayed in In Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, is extensive, ranging from West Indies molasses and Dutch gunpowder in the 18th century to British industrial technologies and African slaves in the 19th century, to French condoms and Canadian booze in the early 20th century, to Mexican workers, Colombian cocaine, and Middle Eastern oil in the 21st century.

From its inception, America encouraged immigrating foreigners, private citizens, state officers, and travelling traders to smuggle in industrial designs, drawings, and European innovation to aid in state-building.

The biggest industrial theft in history though was orchestrated by the Soviet Empire and the US Allied Forces against the Nazis. As World War II heated up and Nazis were in retreat, American and Soviet scientists, researchers and analysts teamed up to loot occupied Germany of military, scientific and technological designs. Trailing behind Allied combat troops, technical teams, such as the Technical Industrial Intelligence Branch (TIIB), and the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS), began confiscating and extricating classified research documents and detaining German experts from German corporations like Hoescht, I. G. Farben, Volkswagen, Messerschmitt, Dornier, and hundreds others in the rural towns.

Visualisation by Juliet Atellah

C. Lester Walker’s Secrets by the Thousands chronicles hundreds of instances where Allied researchers and forces stumbled upon Nazi technologies that were lightyears ahead of what Americans, Soviets, and the British had in their respective countries. This ranged from industrial dyes to V-2 bomb technologies, vaccines, infrared technology, and dairy production designs.

It didn’t take long for research teams embedded among the Allied Forces to realise that they were encountering technology that they couldn’t even operate let alone conceive. This gave birth to Operation Paperclip that saw upwards of 1600 Nazi scientists hurriedly scuttled out of the Nazi- occupied regions onto transatlantic flights heading West.

Annie Jacobsen’s account, In Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America, proves that the fathers of America’s space technology, Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus, were senior and controversial Nazi scientists and so were physicists Georg Goubau and Friedwardt Winterberg.

The Soviets too, through Operation Osoaviakhim, repatriated more than 2,200 German specialists to work in the Soviet Union as the Red Army ransacked the other end of the Nazi Empire. The operation conducted under the leadership of Russia’s KGB boss Ivan Alexandrovich Serov on 22 October 1946 targeted mostly military technology, a tragic tunnel vision that fueled their loss during their Cold War against the West.

The Hoover Fellow Norman M. Naimark, in The Russians in Germany, paints the Soviet industrial age dilemma, given that, unlike the Americans and the Allied forces, the Germans weren’t too far from the Soviet border. The capture of the Nazi scientists therefore carried with it urgent anthropological and historical issues for which mythmaking and brainwashing were deemed necessary.

As Lester Walker notes, it’s a disturbing realisation for modern humans that the most creative period in world history may have occurred under the Nazis between 1932 and 1945, and that it was the murderous and racist Nazis’ scientific research breakthroughs that gifted the modern world a significant majority of its current industrial and technological conveniences.

Espionage? Moi?

Still is it even a vice if the French haven’t tried it? In a 2014 WikiLeaks cable Berry Smutny, the head of the German satellite company OHB Technology, called France the top offender when it comes to industrial espionage, terming them worse than China and Russia.

France has consistently been accused over the decades of going after military, space and aviation technology from every country it deems to have superior inventions in these fields. America’s former Defense Secretary Robert Gates asserts that besides China, France is the second most tenacious and capable cybersecurity risk to America’s defences. It’s a disturbing realisation for modern humans that the most creative period in world history may have occurred under the Nazis between 1932 and 1945, and that it was the murderous and racist Nazis’ scientific research breakthroughs that gifted the modern world a significant majority of its current industrial and technological conveniences.

It’s laughably obtuse, therefore, given the historical economic records, for Europe and America to consistently complain over what they dub China’s massive industrial espionage. According to the US authorities, from 2011 more than 90 per cent of the State Department’s cases alleging economic espionage involving a state pointed at China, and more than two-thirds of the Department’s theft of trade secrets cases were directly linked to China.

For a country with at least 1.2 billion citizens, and 100 cities with at least 1 million people each, and at least 100 firms with a market capitalisation of over $1 billion dollars, China seems unstoppable.

Between 1978 and 2017, China lifted roughly 600 million citizens out of poverty, averaging at 20 million each year, leading to an overall 94.4 percentage points reduction in poverty. By any measure, the economic progress that started with Deng Xiaoping in 1978 remains the greatest economic miracle in the history of mankind. The country’s economic engines might keep pumping for another decade or two before it plateaus out. That’s not how the West view it though. In China, they see a rogue state who steals ideas, and one who’s refused to anchor her growth trajectory on Western patronage and powers, like Japan did in the 80s.

Trade is war

Further south, Africa’s wealth, encumbered by global geopolitical and geo-economic contestations, has consistently been the site of plunder effected through tax havens and illicit financial flows. A significant chunk of this resource theft takes advantage of weak legislation, sleaze, civil wars, population displacement, and weak governance structures. The spread and pervasiveness of this economic carnage can be at best quantified through the over $200 billion in mostly illicit outflows and less than $160 billion inflows through loans and grants.

The Ugandan scholar Yash Tandon, who’s an honorary Professor at Warwick and London Middlesex University, consistently warns African countries that trade is a battle and often a zero sum game often pegged on the scale and efficacy of industrial espionage. Africa, as a crucible of innovation over the last 3,000 years, hasn’t properly calibrated its creative contribution to modern civilization and the resultant loss from corporate espionage.

In Trade is War, Tandon demonstrably shows the Bretton Woods institutions for what they really are: internationally tentacled Western leeches designed to loot African economies and resources. His valuable insider view traces the skewed and aptly misnamed free trade agreements as simply state- sanctioned industrial espionage where economic hitmanship are ratified through charters.

African state bureaucracies, with their inherent mediocrity, often deploy the services of the intellectually weak, the illiterate and the inarticulate and sometimes the naïve among its ranks to represent them in these high stakes intergovernmental forums. The disregard for the fact that it is these global economic institutions who pass regional laws, regulations, pacts and charters ends up favouring their industries, experts, and products over those of the global South.

Crucially, the cyber-espionage bugging of the African Union’s headquarters in Addis Ababa, the dramatic break-in at South Africa’s Pelindaba nuclear facility, and the KGB-cum-CIA double agent Yuri Loginov’s targeting of the Central Bank of Kenya are pretty much the highest profiled and publicised industrial-scale espionages on the continent. Often planted moles, wiretapping, bugging, spy software and rogue employees or a litany of spy methods get deployed to pilfer sensitive corporate and economic data from African state agencies, their embassies abroad, the military, public contractors, national archives, repositories, and research institutes. Africa has not only failed to protect its industrial, commercial and economic secrets, it has for the most part failed to also deploy its own industrial espionage against far much more innovative states and companies across the globe.

That’s why Tandon’s critique constitutes the single biggest indictment of the African nation-state’s lacklustre approach to global trade, the future of their states, trade secrets, and the economic welfare of their firms and citizenry. A significant cluster of African states and those of the global South seem not to have figured out that shrewd pacts, industrial theft and illicit financial flows may just be the paths that propelled the countries whose economic power Africans admire to their current First World status.

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Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend?

By Darius Okolla Tandale estate is a solid flood-prone flat pan stacked amidst patterned limestone shacks at the heart of Dar es Salaam, just north of Kwa Mtogole and south of Kijitonyama and 7 kilometres from Dar’s famous Coco Beach. It’s also home to a former clothes vendor, Naseeb Abdul Juma and Raheem Rummy Nanji from Iringa.

Raheem, a budding musician, would alongside Tanzanian youthful celebrity Hakeem 5 earn the Nyamwezi-sounding moniker Vijana Sharobaro from the versatile all-time hit-maker Dully Sykes, who then worked under Dhahabu Records. In christening them Sharobaro in the 2000s, Sykes, then a popular bongo musician, seemed to have infused their budding careers with long-sought street cred just as the industry panned out to new sounds and styles.

The clothes vendor Naseeb was meanwhile stuck in blue-collar trade, first in freelance photography, then as a filling attendant, and also had a stint in gambling, while pursuing the ever-elusive money for studio fees. Meanwhile Raheem, now famously known as Bob Junior, would go on to establish Sharobaro Records, a hole-in-the-wall recording studio built for its time, and weirdly successful for its stature.

Back in Tandale, Naseeb’s dalliance with talent manager Chizo Mapene didn’t yield much professional or economic outcomes despite lots of initial prospects after which Naseeb hooked up with producer Msafiri Peter, aka Papaa Misifa, in 2009. Naseeb linked up again with Raheem of Sharobaro Records from where he recorded his first major hit, Nenda Kamwambie. The year 2010 looked promising, and with this debut album, the young Naseeb was introduced to Tanzanians and the East African region.

The album is mushy, existential, soulful, with heart-tugging reflections. It is borderline whiny, yet relatable and includes songs like Kamwambie, a dedication to his unrequited love, and Nitarejea sung alongside the ailing star Hawa. The latter is about a love that his foray into the city for work won’t quench despite the distance.

With the three hits – Kamwambie, Mbagala and Nitarejea – Naseeb, now known by his stage name Diamond Platnumz, harnessed the supple fluency of the local Kiswahili dialect and the poetic idioms of street slang to hog the limelight and introduce himself to the world. In a region where the wider creative economy largely apes – and where possible solicits – the stature, money and alliances with global (and mostly American hip hop) for traction, Diamond Platnumz’s success has defied the odds both in style, sound, reach and influence. It’s in his 2017 interview with Forbes magazine where he would credit the traction that enabled him to consistently cash in on his musical talent as the mark that transitioned his music from a passion to a career.

No doubt his ability to craft a cultural Bongo Flava moment owes credence to legends like the 1990s Radio DJ Mike Mhagama. Mhagama coined the term Bongo Flava as a distinctive buzzword for the yet-to-be-defined musical genre that arose after the advent of private radio stations in Tanzania in the mid-1990s. Bongo Flava originated in Dar and is derived from a variety of musical genres, including American hip hop, reggae, R&B, afrobeat, and traditional Swahili musical styles, such as Taraab. The phrase, which was meant to delineate Tanzanian hip hop from American hip hop, anchored itself in the country’s showbiz lexicon as a tell-apart and defining tag for Tanzanian pop.

With the three hits – Kamwambie, Mbagala and Nitarejea – Naseeb, now known by his stage name Diamond Platnumz, harnessed the supple fluency of the local Kiswahili dialect and the poetic idioms of street slang to hog the limelight and introduce himself to the world.

Naseeb’s best contribution to the East African artistic scene is through his WCB Wasafi Records platform, for which the wider public has rewarded the company monetarily and brand-wise due to its astute combination of edgy production, track-for-track hits, balanced quality music, and commercial success. These, coupled with entrepreneurial vision, and unyielding versatility, reminiscent of Bigg’s Roc-a-fella or Irv Gotti’s Murder Inc inevitably centred Wasafi as an East African cultural project.

The 2012 Lala Salama album shifted the recording company from soulful and heart-felt tunes to a flashier Afropop that saw the label pan its wings and doggedly pursue partnerships with Africa-wide celebrities and global brands such as Ishmael ‘Omarion’, and American hip hop star Rick Ross.

Back in Bongo, the musical fan base and their gladiatorial instincts fuelled supremacy wars akin to the imagined rivalry between Ronaldo-Messi in football, or Dar musicians’ Dudu Baya-Mr. Nice’s tiff. The online infractions saw the Wasafi Records founder Naseeb aka Diamond unwittingly pitted against his fellow star and erstwhile rival Ali Kiba. None seemed too pleased by the fan base warfare, which they’ve repeatedly admitted they are unable to quell or contain.

Lizzer Era

Diamond’s 2013 performance in Burundi not only linked the Wasafi founder to Burundian star Lolilo, but also led to a chance encounter with the then Burundi-based influential producer, Kigoma, born Siraj Khamees and stage-named Lizzer Classic.

When Diamond started Wasafi around 2014 – the origins of which came in the midst of a fast-rising career – the Tanzanian music scene had hit a lull after the heydays of Matonya, Mr. Nice and Ray C. His creative and business acumen seems to have chanced upon the realisation that the market yearned for a new sound and style.

From the get-go, reservations arose regarding Lizzer’s sampling of Burundian sounds into Tanzania’s Bongo Flava music. Lizzer, who had fled the 2010 state-sponsored electoral clashes in Bujumbura to Kigoma, was unrelenting and convinced there was place in the Tanzanian market for an updated version of Bongo Flava. He would take his first shot with Rayvanny’s Kwetu, a mushy- tinged serenade whose popularity gave legitimacy to Lizzer’s cross-border musical style.

In the working partnership between Lizzer and Diamond, a rising star met international experience; a mercurial duo akin to the then young Shawn Carter’s co-directorship with the steely Kareem “Biggs” Burke, and the colourful Damon Dash back in 1995.

Wasafi’s rise, like any other cultural moment, exists at the confluence of historical accidents, chance encounters, demand for new sounds, and huge individual effort just at the point where Dar’s audio- visual culture boomed, primarily on YouTube and Vimeo. As Odipodev clarified, the combination of local relatable content, proliferation of smartphones, and YouTube algorithms often helps generate a self-perpetuating model of proliferation and popularity onto what the viewers have already deemed to be superior content.

Lizzer, in his interviews with Bernard Mpangala at the WCB Wasafi offices, modestly remarked that their outsized commercial and cultural success wasn’t anywhere near monopoly, given that lots of their musical stars still work with other producers besides them in producing their albums.

Even then, he’d opine that at least 50 per cent of the album would be produced by Wasafi. Lizzer attributes his updating of Bongo Flava music from its widely varied days in the 2000s to the influence of Korean and Chinese music, of which he is an ardent fan.

The Korean influence on the updated Bongo Flava sounds can no doubt be gleaned from the storylines, the colourful Oriental dressing, and the unsynchronised dance moves of the Korean pop crew BTS in their hit song DNA. The same can be seen in the Chinese pop hits in the strain of NGirl’s Goddess choo choo choo and the Chinese songstress Feng Timo’s sleek improvisations and animated dramatisations, with their parallels in Salome, Zigo, or Mwanza Nyegezi.

Wasafi’s rise, like any other cultural moment, exists at the confluence of historical accidents, chance encounters, demand for new sounds, and huge individual effort just at the point where Dar’s audio-visual culture boomed, primarily on YouTube and Vimeo.

Lizzers’ signature tune Ayo Lizzer is a drop by Diamond edited to obscure his easily recognisable voice. Lizzer claims the tune allows the production team to dissuade artistes from mentioning him in the lyrics while still acknowledging his creative contribution.

Lizzer’s career’s steep ascend in late 2000s in Burundi drove him up the ranks and roped in big regional artistes like Sat B, Big Fizzo, Lolilo, Rally Joe and Emery Sun. Even then, it’s Rayvanny’s Kwetu that earned Lizzer acceptance in Tanzania, and the updated rendition of Saida Karoli’s Salome that set him up as a new sound in East African production.

Let’s make money

The Wasafi ecosystem hit its golden age from 2015, with Rajab ‘Harmonize’ Kahali, their newest signee chugging hit after hit with dizzying commercial success. Then came Mwanajuma ‘Queen Darleen’ and Raymond Shaban ‘Rayvanny’ in 2016, and Richard Martin ‘Rich Mavoko’, Juma Idd ‘Lava lava’ and Yusuph Kilungi ‘Mbosso’’s hits in 2017. Wasafi became a Foxconn of music in which insane work schedules blended with keen and demanding producers, and ever inventive back stage casts.

Director Diamond, as well as managers Babu Tale, Sallam SK, Said Fella, Joseph King, and producers Lizzer and Tuddy Thomas capitalised on the new sounds to feed a frenzied and ever- expanding fan base, while revitalising production wherever their music was heard. The rising popularity, combined with commercial astuteness and a growing band of talented artistes, saw the label dabble in top-selling ringtones, pricey and sold-out concerts, Wasafi Festival tours, royalties, product lines, club and TV appearances, and brand deals.

The Tanzanian record label pursued a multimedia model with the music streaming service wasafi.com launched first, while Wasafi TV and Wasafi FM further widened their reach and offering. This Wasafi ecosystem’s unprecedented savviness also earned them brand endorsements from Vodacom, Red Gold, DSTV, and Coca Cola.

The litany of commercial streams rewarded their work ethic and ingenuity. And while Wasafi’s market capitalisation is fuzzy and its transactional records remain inaccessible, Diamond’s estimated $4.5 million net worth is astronomical by any measure.

Curiously, the Wasafi ecosystem’s numerous rags to riches stories within its ranks is easily traceable to a policy of working with talents from poor backgrounds, something the directors admit to be true and deliberate. The ecosystem’s big acts, Konde boy Harmonize, Chibu Dangote Diamond, and Vannyboy have morphed from bootstrapping a half a decade ago to commanding fees in excess of $10,000 to $70,000 per show and earning upwards of $25,000 from streaming apps monthly.

This outsized influence has come with its own fair share of challenges. For instance, Baraza la Sanaa Tanzania (BASATA) took a moralisng stance against the artistes’ song Mwanza over what it dubbed explicit content. In 2018 BASATA put a leash on two of the label’s defiant big stars, RayVanny and Diamond, who in the end called for a truce owing to the risk of commercial losses that came with the ban.

Mr Kayanda, the agency’s interim executive secretary, brought down the full force of regulatory coercion, which elicited the age-old question of who deems what is explicit and triggered a moral debate in artistic expression. BASATA’s move amounted to predictable flexing, given President Magufuli’s wider crackdown on dissent, including clamping down on media personalities and political dissidents.

The litany of commercial streams rewarded their work ethic and ingenuity. And while Wasafi’s market capitalisation is fuzzy and its transactional records remain inaccessible, Diamond’s estimated $4.5 million net worth is astronomical by any measure.

Despite lacking a clear social cause, the Wasafi ecosystem has latched onto Dar es Salaam’s goal of providing 100,000 additional desks in its primary school classes as part of plugging the 1.4 million desks deficit. Their overall social cause and focus has, however, not been noteworthy outside of scouting for talent among the lowest socio-economic strata. The politically-conscious musician Roma Mkatoliki of the Rostam crew, who is a former teacher, and a dozen other artistes have also jumped onto the donation bandwagon.

The waning years

WCB Wasafi’s ecosystem has managed to inspire a cultural moment, and an ardent fan base, and has surpassed the mere tag of a label or a brand. However, for this ecosystem, achieving collective success has been the easy part while handling individual flaws, infighting, substantial talents, and an ever-growing team and fame has proved to be a challenge.

Rommy Jones, the founder’s kin, who is also Wasafi’s DJ, reckons that the artistes’ love lives and their relations with the female fan base are the main source of trouble for the organisation. In recent months, Diamond publicly fell out with his partner Zari Hassan and hooked up with video vixen Hamisa Mobetto, and then moved on to Tanasha Donna, while Rayvanny has a long talked-about dalliance with a Kenyan socialite.

Meanwhile, Harmonize dumped his lover after an alleged romp with a Caucasian female acquaintance. Rommy faced sexual assault allegations during Diamond’s April 2016 tour of Sweden, which led to Diamond cutting short his performances.

Besides trouble with the national arts council (BASATA), artistes’ exit from the recording firm could either be viewed as them having grown too big for one platform, or as the road to the demise of what’s still the most popular and competitive recording company in the region.

The record company first sign-up, Harmonize, has exited the label while the prodigious Richard Rayvanny is allegedly also on his way back to his former Tip Top Records, citing dissatisfaction with his contract. Mbosso’s manager, Ms. Sandra Brown, checked out, and so did Mr. Joel Vicent Joseph, who complained of poor pay and workplace harassment from one of the big name singers.

In a move reminiscent to Roc A Fella’s 2002 fallout in which Shawn ‘Jay Z’ Carter and co-director Damon Dash, while enjoying huge creative success, were grappling with behind-the-scenes squabbles, Rayvanny felt relegated to third place as Harmonize took second spot.

Mtwara-born Harmonize, it is said, was unhappy with Chibu’s public revelations of his personal matters. He was also displeased with regards to his contractual obligations, which eventually led him to exit and form the Konde Gang label.

WCB Wasafi’s ecosystem has managed to inspire a cultural moment and an ardent fan base, and has surpassed the mere tag of a label or a brand. However, for this ecosystem, achieving collective success has been the easy part while handling individual flaws, infighting, substantial talents, and an ever-growing team and fame has proved to be a challenge.

Because it is still patronised by great talent managers Babu Tale and Tudd Thomas, and producer Lizzer’s innovative knack, as well as a huge financial chest, and street smarts, the Wasafi ecosystem may survive much longer than the naysayers imagine. Through this ecosystem, Naseeb, the boy from Tandale, has managed to morph local music into likable and popular music, earning it both regional appeal and international stature.

The record label’s rise though has put it at crosshairs with Clouds Entertainment, who though coming in later into the Tanzanian arts scene after DJ Mhagama had launched Bongo Flava, views itself as the bona fide curator of Tanzania’s youthful cultural revolution. The late Ruge Muhataba and Joe Kusaga seemed unamused by the rise of a new media ecosystem outside of their patronage and capacity. This worsened after the altercation between a Wasafi staffer and two journalists from Clouds Media in February 2018 after which Cloud banned all Wasafi music and arts from their platforms.

The ultimate test for the five-year-old Wasafi platform will be managing Harmonize’s transition from the ecosystem since he co-owned Zoom Production Inc with Diamond. Zoom is one of the biggest cogs in the ecosystem and in charge of most of its video productions.

As they straddle between sizeable successes, an insatiable fan base and internal fallouts, the Wasafi ecosystem, ironically, risks getting cannibalised by a cultural moment that it was instrumental in creating.

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Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend?

By Darius Okolla

The Korean economic landscape is dominated by chaebols, Americans have conglomerates, the Japanese have Zaibatsus, Germans have Mittlestands, while Kenyans have, well, let’s call them Mamols – a cluster of faceless, powerful, family-owned enterprises whose stake in the economy is massive and diverse and which form the core to the competitiveness of the Kenyan economy. Mamols, the word derived from native Dholuo for tendril-like tentacle plants that intertwine their way into multiple nearby vegetation to form a strong mesh-like interconnected undergrowth.

Kenya’s economy, as currently constituted, represents a feudal-like family economy dominated by a few well-capitalised family-owned units at both the top and mid-tier. At a glance, the majority of the 7.4 million small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in Kenya are conventionally family businesses owing to their initial source of capital, ownership and day-to-day operations.

A chaebol, or in our case a mamol, is a large industrial firm that is run and controlled by a founder and his or her family. Their internal make-up is that of a large number of diversified affiliate brands, products and markets under a patriarch whose power over the business operations often exceeds legal authority.

There are significant differences between Japanese aaibatsus, Korean chaebols, Kenyan mamols, and American conglomerates, key among them being the source of capital. The aaibatsus organised around a bank, chaebols were prohibited from owning a bank, their American counterparts go to Wall Street, while Kenyan mamols rely on internal revenues and private equity for growth.

The constitutive nature of these businesses is any profit-making venture patronised by two or more family members in its workforce and the majority of ownership or control lying within that family. Traditionally, such corporate structures place the founding patriarchs and matriarchs at the helm and family members in ownership positions, allowing them to exert direct control across the board. Family-level investments are known to tap into the general social immobility of capital, which tentatively guarantees that if properly transitioned, the resources can stay within the family for anywhere between five and six generations.

Family-owned businesses are the backbone of the global economy. The Conway Centre for Family Business estimates that 35 per cent of Fortune 500 companies are family-controlled across the full spectrum of firms, from small niche outlets to major brands. In fact, family businesses account for 50 per cent of the U.S. gross domestic product, generate 60 per cent of the country’s employment, and account for 78 per cent of all new job creation.

The East Africa region has a wide array of such firms, which shrewd private-equity investors can explore in the medium to large segment with market caps of between $10 million and $100 million. The research firm Asoko’s data identified over 10,000 firms in this revenue bracket across a diverse range of markets in East and West Africa.

The Conway Centre for Family Business estimates that 35 per cent of Fortune 500 companies are family-controlled across the full spectrum of firms, from small niche outlets to major brands.

Unsurprisingly, only a handful of the thousands of family-owned firms in Kenya reach elite status or provide strong products, brands, and services across the region, thus significantly influencing the export basket. Extrapolation of local studies indicates that there are 645 family-owned firms earning between $10 million and $100 million annually in East Africa, with nearly three out of every four of these companies being Kenyan, followed by Ethiopia, at 17 per cent, Zambia, at 5 per cent, and Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania, at 2 per cent each. Asoko’s research further identified 490 family- owned Kenyan firms earning annual revenues in excess of Sh1 billion across a wide range of industries; of the 490, 14.3 per cent, or 70 companies, earn more than Sh5 billion, 22 of which earn over Kshs 10 billion every year. Within these hallowed halls of prime family-owned enterprises that churn premium products, there exist complexities and contradictions cutting across the family-business divide in which virtues and vices on one end diffuse to the other end with speed and ferocity. Much more intuitively, their very nature as family-owned businesses results in unique models of starting, running and decision- making, the end result of which is usually a surprising litany of dilemmas: political interference, their worries about work and sibling rivalry, inheritance squabbles, and most of all, the fears for the heirs.

Locally, the roughly 500 sprawling family-run conglomerates with at least $10 million in revenues are the understated cornerstones of Kenya’s economic, political and social landscape. Taken together, they make up the silent pillars of the nation’s versatile economy and include the likes of KenPoly, and ICEA Lion, with Ramco being among the oldest of them all. Unlike the globally renowned family-owned firms like Walton, the Korean Chaebols or Japanese corporate giants, most African Kenyan Mamols in particular, prefer to court as little publicity as possible partly because corporate culture generally abhors uncourted publicity given the landmines of publicity.

The PwC 2018 Family Business Survey indicated expected revenue growth in 82 per cent of the family-owned enterprises – a major feat in this era of fiscal constraints and declining exports in the country occasioned by high energy costs and over-taxation. The top obstacles to surmount are corruption (72 per cent), accessing the right skills and talents (52 per cent), prices of inputs (52 per cent), competition from cheap imports (52 per rcent) and the pressure to innovate (50 per cent).

Locally, the roughly 500 sprawling family-run conglomerates with at least $10 million in revenues are the understated cornerstones of Kenya’s economic, political and social landscape. Taken together, they make up the silent pillars of the nation’s versatile economy…

These massive firm’s opaque and often unexamined governance and ownership structures and oversized influence, coupled with their cosy relationship with regulators, often lends credence to fears of influence-peddling. No doubt, as the fiscal condition of the political economy under the Jubilee government tightens, it will cast an intense spotlight on these firms, just at the time when many are navigating murky generational transitions. Absent are clear models of generational transition of wealth acquired and sustained through the patriarch’s political or social patronage, which leaves the heirs ill-prepared for their inherited fortune.

Given the nature of our political economy, most of these firms rely on close cooperation with the political structures for their operations, inducing decades of political goodwill, and support. The guarantee could be in the form of subsidies, loans, and tax incentives only imagined by their rivals. That the president, cabinet secretaries, and top bureaucrats can trace their political fortune to the attendant patronage of family capitalism gives the best glimpse of these firms’ impact in our political infrastructure.

In Latin America, family capitalism is at its most efficient in the pursuit of political power and using tentacled connections to launder public and private resources. In Argentina, the family-owned firm’s goal is political conquest with presidential and gubernatorial positions as the ultimate prize.

In keeping with the largely conservative investment decisions of these investors, 60 per cent of them populate the agricultural, industrial and manufacturing sectors of the economy. A survey by consultancy firm Knight Frank shows that these clusters have allocated 25 per cent of their investment portfolios to equities, 22 per cent to property and 22 per cent to cash or cash equivalents, with only 3 per cent in private equity and another 3 per cent in luxuries stuff such as art, wine and luxury cars.

Given the nature of our political economy, most of these firms rely on close cooperation with the political structures for their operations, inducing decades of political goodwill, and support. The guarantee could be in the form of subsidies, loans, and tax incentives only imagined by their rivals.

Curiously, Kenya’s leading family-owned enterprises are still within the first three generations of ownership, a fact tied to the barely 60 year-old independence in this 100 year-old plantation. Large industrial firms like Ramco, which traces its roots back to precolonial 1940s, signals a growing sustenance and entrenchment of these Mamols into the heart of the nation’s political economy. Ranci is currently chaired by one of the sons of the original patriarch who is subordinated by members of the third generation, a feat replicated by only one other company, which is on its third generation of leadership from within the family.

Lots of other mamols are still being ruled by first- and second-generation leadership and often silently face precarious generational transitions. Surprisingly, about 17 per cent of the top family- owned conglomerates have a succession plan ahead of the global 14 per cent average. The generational divide, coupled with increasing complexity and diversity of skills that the firm needs as it grows, predisposes the second or third generations who take over the reins of family businesses to be more open to outside investors, and hiring of experts. Globally, just 30 per cent of family businesses make it through the second generation, with only 13 per cent passing three generations, which is the context within which lots of these huge Kenyan firms exist.

What’s their story?

As the founders phase out, there’s the compelling case of having fantastically wealthy heirs dealing with wealth that is inherited rather than earned, which may predispose them to hubris. The perpetuation of the firm is not a great deal more fulfilling to them as it was to the founders. Despite being vibrant contributors to the economy, family-owned businesses face corporate governance issues, political wheeler-dealing and flaky succession plans whose overall impact limits the company’s lifespan. In total, just over half of Kenya’s family businesses reported having a succession plan in place, with two-thirds indicating that the next generation was already part of the business.

The litany of generational differences, fraying and differing visions of the future and emerging challenges and gaps compel the patriarchs to invoke external talents to increase the talent pool available for operations. Consequently, a more recent survey has revealed that family businesses in Kenya are in robust health, with revenues expected to continue growing in four out of every five firms.

According to the Finnish Family Firm Association 2009 report there are three prime ownership models in these family-owned firms: first, the owner, active in governance with three overlapping roles as manager, family member, and owner; second, the owner, non-active in governance, is a family member and owner; and third, non-owning, active in governance family member has two roles as owner and as manager. A non-family member active in governance can be a member of the board or management; also a non-family member can be owner as a capital investor or as a managing director who owns shares of the family firm.

Then there are the family members, who have no role as owners or managers and who are typically spouses (in-laws), trustees and next of kin. Relatives of most of Kenya’s stock market billionaires prefer to stay out of the public limelight, avoiding governance roles, such as directorships, in the portfolio companies where their families control major shareholding.

The Family Business Survey 2018 shows that the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE)’s main value proposition to mamols – visibility, access to financing and a divestment platform – appeal to the 46 polled companies whose turnovers range from Sh500 million to more than Sh10 billion. Eighty-five per cent of the Mamols rely on internal cash and 83 per cent on bank lending/credit lines, while 59 per cent prefer private equity at a higher percentage than the global average of 39 per cent.

What complicates analysis of these behemoths is that Kenya is known to have a large group of politically-connected superrich families who have hidden their wealth in trusts and a labyrinth of companies to evade taxes. In 2015, a list of 191 individuals and 25 offshore companies linked to Kenya was leaked from the Mossack Fonseca legal firm and published in what came to be known as the Panama papers. The companies and individuals held the cash equivalent of over Sh15 trillion laundered and transferred from Kenya.

The dark side of family businesses

During the United Nations International Day of the Family in Nairobi, Justice Aggrey Muchelule said that the Family Division has resorted to alternative dispute resolution mechanisms in the quest to resolve the over 13, 000 succession cases over family-owned assets left behind by parents, spouses or other benefactors. Court and political battles over large firms and other properties left to heirs of prime family-owned firms in Kenya pop up regularly even where there is a will. Few of these cases arrive at amicable solutions.

The properties in dispute range from shares to money stashed in banks and tax havens abroad and businesses and other assets, but land still remains the most contested asset; some of these cases have been unresolved since the 1980s. Mbiyu Koinange, James Kanyotu, Gershom Kirima, Jenga Karume, and JM Kariuki’s families are among the affected as the Unclaimed Financial Assets Authority (UFAA) has had to seize their dividends and shares following family feuds over ownership and succession.

Despite their tenacity, the family business model often tends to undermine its own longevity, profitability and efficiency through political favouritism, succession by unfit heirs, endless feuds, and sleaze, including excessive and unnecessary luxury spending on the company’s tab. Examples of drastic declines in family fortunes can be found in Russia and the Middle East.

Locally, while addressing the family of the late Murang’a-born oil tycoon Thayu Kabugi during his burial, President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose family has a major controlling stake in the Kenyan economy, reflected that assembling an estate worth billions of shillings was not a simple task as it takes a lot of struggle, toil and back-breaking work. “But we are seeing a situation whereby families of these icons of our economy go after each other’s throats days after the demise of their economic fortune heroes. That is not the way to go and I would urge all families to desist from such tussles,” he said.

The looming political and economic crises simultaneously plaguing the country has exhausted the country’s political-economy’s capacity to self-correct. A major hit to the economy, the population bulge, massive corruption, and the upcoming elections and referendum will reorient the list of families that control the national pie by raising a few while sinking others. It shouldn’t be lost to us that those who’ve stashed Sh15 trillion abroad stand a better chance of surviving the storm and snapping up the auctioned assets at dirt-poor prices and entrenching their family capitalism for another generation. Despite their tenacity, the family business model often tends to undermine its own longevity, profitability and efficiency through political favouritism, succession by unfit heirs, endless feuds, and sleaze, including excessive and unnecessary luxury spending on the company’s tab.

An annual study was released ahead of the 2019 World Economic Forum that shows that globally wealth is consolidating back into the hands of a few, with 26 billionaires owning as much as the lower 3.6 billion people in the world. Combined with declining social safety nets, the family business model remains the short-term cushion and guarantor of social mobility for large swathes of the population.

Family businesses range in size, turnover, ownership structures and profitability, from small roadside stalls to behemoths straddling national boundaries. Despite all the squabbles and relational upheavals, family businesses remain a critical means of wealth transfer and generational transition of wealth, opportunity and income.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend?

By Darius Okolla Take some time and think of the term “rural modernity”. Who lives there? What images and ideas does the term conjure? Is it the sprawling landscape of Mbeere land, or the pristine habitations of Kuresoi? Perhaps it’s the undulating plateau of Kitale or the semi-scorched arid life of Kitui? The soggy greenery of Tana River County or the rocky face of Pokot land? Perhaps the dense greenery of Nyandarua or the flat-bed landscape of rural Nyanza?

Rural means more than just the oft-quoted laid-back serenity, a retreat from the visible power of urbanity its sleek consumerism. Rather, rural modern currently exists as a crucible for new versions of what’s to be considered modern, with a distinct role and curation of Kenya’s national life.

The rise of rural modernity in Kenya – inspired by the mobile handset, devolution, the motorbike craze, and mobile money transfer services – has impacted different rural set-ups in unique ways as regards to economic stresses, the road network, digital growth, the rural electrification programme, shrinking land sizes, and the evolution of local identities.

Consequently, rural modernity has come to be associated with tight communal living and for many sociologists, this idea of close-knit kinship embodies the essence of what differentiates rural life from urban life. As French sociologist Alex De Tocqueville, who explored and observed the rural modernity of 19thcentury North America, remarked, ”Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part but others of a thousand different types – religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.”

The varied models of rural modernity reflect diversely in cultural events, slang, social norms, geographical accidents, and much more intuitively in culinary habits ranging from food buying, preparation, preservation, and consumption. For many of these rural enclaves, their food systems and culinary cultures are made up of complex, nuanced, and nutritionally diverse diets, rituals, signals of hierarchy and even care. Hence, such culinary cultures and food systems, when properly observed around the country, give critical insights into what is at stake agriculturally and socially, and in terms of economics and dietary attitudes.

A food system is a complex web of diverse interrelated ideas on how food production, processing, storage, purchase, and dietary choices intersect. This ranges from the economics of food production, culinary constraints, food safety concerns, sustainability issues, food wastage, and their social and ecological impact on persons and families in such far-flung places as Todonyang in Turkana county at the North-Eastern border between Kenya and Ethiopia.

Besides religion, farming remains one of the core and now receding emblems of Kenyan rural life, where it not only serves as the primary source of income but also as the driving force and pervasive influence in the rural economy and in social relations. Despite the changes brought about by rapid urbanisation, the legacy of this historical centrality of farming to rural modernity is still visible today in up-country villages and is evident in the travels into rural areas. The irony is that a major aspect of the change in rural areas since the advent of phones and motorbikes has been the evolution of agriculture, which has seen farming edged to the margins of everyday rural life as most residents divest.

Food security in the counties

In modern times, the agricultural evolution makes up only a part of the story of rural modernity, which is backed by other traditional rural economic pursuits, such as gambling, forestry, micro- firms, fishing, and quarrying. Within their demographics, rural enclaves are living organisms pegged on certain wealth inequalities, terrains, land economics, demographic pressures, informality, location, and rural anthropology honed over decades.

That’s why, even as austerity hits the country, different rural populations will adjust differently to the fiscal meltdown, especially given that it’s mostly public spending that drives growth and money circulation in these rural regions. The working projections based on the urban/rural ratio of counties, their food systems, location, public spending, demographics and per capita incomes shows that freezing public spending on projects is going to be felt immediately in cities.

Besides religion, farming remains one of the core and now receding emblems of Kenyan rural life, where it not only serves as the primary source of income but also as the driving force and pervasive influence in the rural economy and in social relations.

Nairobi, which is demographically a slum town, will gentrify, given that its food systems are dependent on external supply units– a fair share of which use pesticides with active ingredients. The fact that 2.5 million of the more than 4 million Nairobi residents live in over 280 slums means that Nairobians’ tenuous existence makes them the first causalities of a food crunch and relocation.

Mombasa has a huge pool of indigenous Mijikenda community members so there’s going to be little migration and the county also spent a huge amount on projects which might offset a bit of the economic heat. Mombasa and Eldoret towns (not the counties) might see greater food resource conflicts too, heightened tribalism, and clannism.

Kilifi too has spent quite a bit on projects, but it also has a majority of rural poor, which means that its social structure and the subsistence food systems won’t change a lot.

Kisumu is highly dependent on neighbouring counties and Uganda for food and sustenance. This city of over half a million people (the third-largest in the country) is also the fifth in revenue generation, which means most of its value lies in asset value as opposed to trading.

Therefore, the rising food prices will dent it economically – unless the city thinks of alternatives, and fast. Nyeri and Meru still have large rural land-dependent and relatively stable internal food systems, for whatever they are worth. Curiously, Kiambu town is exhibiting the same symptoms that Trans- Nzoia had in the 1990s, with an explosion of small-scale traders comprising blue-collar workers from the small industries around the county.

Kisii, Murang’a, and Nyamira will see more social conflicts, thanks to the small land units squeezed by subdivision. Land and food resource stresses might lead to hostilities.

Migori, Kwale, Samburu, Uasin Gishu, as well as Narok, have a lot of peri-urban, well-off communities with relatively healthy cashflows, which might stave off some of the effects of the austerities and provide high dietary options.

The industrial collapse in the Mumias side of Kakamega will precipitate heightened food insecurity and food conflict, while the relative homogeneity of Kakamega town will experience rural-rural migration. The Likuyani/Turbo has food systems, though they will also be strained. Bungoma, which has a lot of rural poor (the second-highest in the country) will sink further, though its food systems, if properly managed, might mitigate some of that.

Counties with largely rural modernity like Siaya and Taita-Taveta, which also have low development spending, will struggle to sustain their social frameworks.

Nairobi, which is demographically a slum town, will gentrify, given that its food systems are dependent on external supply units…The fact that 2.5 million of the more than 4 million Nairobi residents live in over 280 slums means that Nairobians’ tenuous existence makes them the first causalities of a food crunch and relocation.

The demographic dividend in Tharaka-Nithi will have to boost its food supplies and export it to other counties to offset resource pressure.

Vihiga County is quite multi-ethnic with small-town life and food systems that risk being snuffed. Meanwhile, West Pokot, Elgeyo, Nandi, Isiolo, and Turkana have dicey food prospects.

Most of the towns in the lower eastern region will become sanctuaries for people seeking economic prospects as food systems in their respective hometowns dry up. If properly managed, Nakuru, Laikipia, Kapsabet, and Kericho will become the top four main food refuge centres in the country as austerities bite.

Trans-Nzoia will deteriorate further while border counties like Busia, Homa Bay, Taita-Taveta and Garissa might depopulate as more people seek food and sustenance across the border to offset shrinking prospects this side of the border.

Culinary options

Milk and its related products makeup the top foods consumed in both urban and rural Kenya, trailed by maize, wheat, and vegetables. The 2018 Food Balance Sheet (FBS) by the National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) put the milk products per capita usage at 93 kg in 2018, with maize and maize products (69kg) second, followed by wheat products (41kg) and vegetables (32kg). The biggest change in per capita demand registered was in bananas, at 27kg, which is an 82 percent jump from the previous year, followed by a 42% rise in tomatoes, with each Kenyan consuming 8.5kg in 2018.

The rise in milk consumption nationally coincided with an 18 per cent growth in milk production, from 535 million litres to 634million litres last year, with milk products, such as ghee, cream, cheese, and butter, also recording a rise.

Most of the towns in the lower eastern region will become sanctuaries for people seeking economic prospects as food systems in their respective hometowns dry up. If properly managed, Nakuru, Laikipia, Kapsabet, and Kericho will become the top four main food refuge centres in the country as austerities bite.

The current initiative of giving free milk to nursery school pupils in Nairobi, Mombasa, Murang’a, Embu, and Migori also spiked the demand. Keep in mind that it wasn’t the Portuguese introduction of maize to the Swahili in the 1500s, but its commercialisation by the British in the 1800s that made it a staple food, quickly replacing sorghum and millet. The current trends indicate a shift towards bananas while wheat and tomatoes remain the next most popularly consumed food commodities. Meanwhile, potatoes, rice, beans, cassava, and onions recorded massive drops.

Livestock keeping

Kenya’s total population estimate of 50 million will raise the demand for animal-source foods, with the cattle and chicken population ticking upwards significantly. The 100 million citizens by 2050 will need an extra 8 million tonnes of milk, beef and chicken to meet food demands.

The current animal census is 45 million poultry, 27 million goats, 19 million cattle (14 million beef cattle and 5 million cows), 19 million sheep, 3 million camels, 2 million donkeys, and 0.5 million pigs. Cattle, mostly from the arid and semi-arid areas (ASALs), and chicken make up about 70 percent to the total livestock production. The per capita livestock product needs for the average Kenyan is approximated at 121 litres of milk, 16 kg of meat, and 45 eggs per person per annum.

Land sizes in Kenya

A critical variable of our food system is land-ownership. The majority of land ownership in the country is smallholder ownership, which dominates the 4,500,000 title deeds issued since 2013, as well as the 5,600,000 issued between 1963 and 2012.

A Kenya Land Alliance (KLA) review of the millions of these title deeds issued between 2013 and 2017 revealed glaring gender disparities in the actual land sizes titled for men and women. The disaggregated and analysed data revealed that of the over 1 million titles issued over that period, women only got 103,043 titles or 10.3 percent, while men got 865,095 titles, accounting for 86.5 percent. The data collated from 47 county land registries shows that out of the 10.1 million hectares of land-titled, women got 163,253 hectares, which is a partly 1.62 percent, while men got 9.9 million hectares, or 97.7 percent.

Milk and its related products makeup the top foods consumed in both urban and rural Kenya, trailed by maize, wheat, and vegetables.

Meanwhile, large landholdings (an estimated 2.5 million acres, mostly patronised by elite white families) skew land sizes and ownership, especially in rural enclaves such as rural Nakuru, Isiolo, Lamu, as well as Laikipia County, which straddles the slopes of Mt Kenya and the Rift Valley escarpments. The local Maa community in Laikipia, numbering about 40,000, are huddled onto small patches of land totalling 281, 000 acres. Meanwhile, the Euro-American community, and a few well-connected local barons numbering about 20, occupy 36 estates (75 percent of the land), each ranging from between 5,000 acres to over 100,000 acres, most of which are designated as wildlife sanctuaries.

Radical rural shifts

Population pressures, compounded by digital leaps, massive use of carcinogenic pesticides, rural electrification, the betting craze, app-based credit facilities, farming as tradition, real estate-ification of rural lands, and the intersection of tech and farming have reshaped the food systems both positively and negatively. The overall effects of these changes on Kenya’s food systems precipitate the marginalisation of the over 600,000 smallholder farmers, the cartelisation of the value-addition process, the weakening of local wholesale and retail chains, shifts in rural food industries, and a rise in the supply of processed foods. These rural food systems ought to be wrestled away from brokers and optimised to evenly distribute gains to rural economies.

It is not just the physical aspects of rural spaces that are rapidly evolving; oral histories, food systems, social relations, and economic life are also being transformed, leading to the silent loss of traditional culinary knowledge of the people who have lived in the rural milieu for the better part of their lives. If tapped into, rural food systems, as vibrant, sophisticated, and complex purveyors of sustenance and modernity, can infuse Kenya’s national life with a diverse variety of dishes that should be mainstreamed.

Therefore, urgency and care ought to be extended to the evolution of rural modernity in ways that check the power of large agrochemical brands in the food chain and the hegemony of manipulated big money agro-politics.

Written and published with the support of the Route to Food Initiative (RTFI) (www.routetofood.org). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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

Follow us on Twitter. Guns, Oil and Water in Turkana County: What Do the Stars Portend?

By Darius Okolla

Meals, beyond meeting our dietary and nutritional needs, is pretty much one of the most telling signallers of Kenya’s social sensibilities, in which food preparation, serving, availability, and taboos give insights into our people’s histories, geographies, ethnicities, tragedies, and self-perceptions.

That we’re a crop people, with crops making up 81% of our food output and yet milk products records the highest consumption belies the fact that our supply systems are still better geared towards industrialized supplies.

Still, maize and wheat and their related products come in at a close second and third respectively in national food consumption. According to the status of traditional vegetable report, 200 species growing naturally in Kenya are used as leafy vegetables. About 10 more exotic species introduced during the pre-colonial period have been integrated into the traditions of various communities and can therefore be regarded as traditional vegetables.

Ethnobotanist Patrick M. Maundu’s research documented 10 exotic species introduced into Kenya in the pre-colonial period of which the top three of maize, milk and wheat have recorded higher profitability pegged on the large scale technological production. Consequently this has entrenched the food industries the primary arbiters of Kenya’s culinary aspects with the resultant cartelism, artificial shortages, oligopolies, market inefficiencies and food safety issues. Food occupies this complex place in society and social order, a fact that led the pioneer gastronomy Jean Brillat-Savarin to remark ‘Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are.

Pretty much all indigenous foods chiefly Cassava (8th), Sorghum (15th), and Millet (19th) position, have been edged out of the primary consumption basket. Mass production of the top industrial food items, pegged on their mass marketing, industrial production and the resultant lower prices put them at the top of the totem pole of food intake. Even then, the distinction between foreign and indigenous foods is fluid and often tentative given the transitory nature of ethnic cultures including food and culinary habits among ethnicities over time.

Food and Meaning

Food, therefore as a cultural and ethnic text, expresses the truism that man, since his prehistoric times, was able to link nutritious foods not just with robust health but also its capacity as a social marker, cultural identity, and insight into the economic, myth-making, and resource constraints of his immediate ecology.

Peoples are what they eat and the dietary consumption and what we choose to imbibe, or not consume based on habits, health, religion, or taboos symbolically reflect this dynamic. Our respective food traditions communicate to others, our beliefs, cultural and social backgrounds, incomes, and experiences. Granted there are many reasons why we exclude certain foods from our diet, from basic health issues to deep cultural and personal beliefs.

An intuitive survival need such as eating, that all humans share, is also something that we use to differentiate ourselves; our psychologies, anthropologies, individual preferences, desires, sense- making, economic capacity, health concerns, farming practices, and social limitations.

Food political Failure

At the economic level, resource constraints and starvation occasioned by the current political failure, limits dietary choices in terms of available food, pricing, alternative meals, and future food needs, with drought warning mechanisms estimating one-third of the 4 million Nairobi residents as starving.

In many ways the frequent food shortages and the attendant perennial famine are reflections of political and policy failure to modernize our supply systems, audit our food systems, and mainstream food security initiatives. This phenomenon isn’t just a city problem as shrinking land sizes have necessitated the need for food purchases even in rural Kenya.

New City Norm

The average Kenyan therefore, robbed of the capacity to consistently afford, and access quality variety of meals is forced to a primary dependency on the Kibanda food stall culture. These Kibandas as profit-making ventures definitely go for the cheapest easy-to-mass-produce foods on the menu item.

Their lack of proper food safety notwithstanding, the Kibanda culture plugs the gaps in urban food supply systems, and shortens the elaborate process of food production at home, for an exhausted and fast-paced urban dwellers.

Grocerants and delis in supermarkets meanwhile play the same role Kibanda do but for the middling and upper classes. Keenly aware of the changing lifestyles of the ingredient shoppers, supermarkets shifted from only selling ingredients and recipes to also fixing the meal and selling it like a restaurant. This trend started with the retail outlet Tuskys supermarket in 2014 before their competitors caught on, buoyed by the convergence of tech and hospitality, and the desire for fresh food, access, and convenience at decent prices.

Cucumbers on Sale

What’s never obvious to the average Kenyan is that the structure of society closely correlates to the nature of its status foods. Societies with small social classism tend to have more elaborate staple foods and go for larger portions, while highly unequal and stratified societies place inordinate emphasis on culinary style, quality and even presentation. Hence, depending on the society’s structure, food either becomes a bonding mechanism for neighbours and friends, or a signifier of exclusivity, distance, class, and prestige.

Further to that, culturally homogeneous communities designate uniqueness of an occasion based on quantities of foods served. Meanwhile the interactions in heterogeneous cultures say during inter- ethnic dowry negotiations, special occasions are designated uniqueness based on the variety of cuisines served. Despite the stratified nature of our local society haute cuisines and fine dining haven’t taken root since Kenyans-even the elite strata-still prefer foods they know. This lack of experimentation with food has curtailed fine dining restaurant culture even as casual dining, kibanda culture, and fast food outlets continue to grow and expand.

The underlying issue here could be that Kenya lacks a notable process of aristocratic acculturation such as can be spotted among Rwandese, Ugandan, French or South African nobilities. Hence we’re stuck with a financial and economic elite who besides monetary outlay do not have any binding social sensibilities, dining rituals, and any unique markers of identity formation outside of high incomes.

Markedly, in cultures where there is an abundance of food, slender bodies are associated with privilege and status, while in societies where food is scarce, there is the perception that being chubby is a status marker. However body image, in relation to food, has increasingly lesser social meaning, given that we’re more inundated with Euro-American notions of fitness, beauty, and bodily aesthetics.

Eat Your Caviar

These Euro-American notions do not stop at how we perceive bodies, even what’s often considered good food whether in movies or Instagram is mostly white food, American food or generally processed foods. While I’m focusing on white foods here, coffee, tea and alcohol are also used in similar ways. Brand name Euro-American beverage and food varieties pasted on our digital profiles are overtly supposed to signify prestige and implicitly convey taste and status.

Indigenous Kenyan foods are then exoticised within the make-believe Kenyan high-society and sold as special cuisines. These classists and racial notions of food hierarchy relegate local dishes to healthy but low-status meals best left to the sick, the aged and those in the rural enclaves.

The politics of food much more poignantly plays out even locally with the Kikuyus and their stereotypical soupy foods, political connotation of wishy-washy politician as watermelons, and the signifier of tribal rank in the disdainful phrasing uthamaki ní witù, thamaki ní ciao, as well as Luhyas and their typecasted food quantities.

Who Moved My Cheese?

Further away from tribal stereotypes foods as religious markers distinguishes local sects, genders and communities who are bounded by certain edicts. The growing yoga community in the country desigantes certain food consumption so does the vegan society, as well as the vegetarian communities.

Adventists relation with red meat, Halal foods for Muslims, Kosher for the Jewish community and the organic feeders work within a wider framework of food censures and freedoms for cultural, health, ideological or religious reasons. Eat of the Ground

The organic food network is gradually gifting a growing cluster of health and safety conscious Kenyans with a healthy and well-curated food system. The Kenya Organic Agriculture Network (KOAN) has designated the organic markets in Nairobi to include the Organic Farmers Market next to Hillcrest, US Embassy Organic Farmers Market, Kids Ventures Garden Estate, and Karengata Farmers’ Market both in Karen, Community Sustainable Agriculture and Healthy Environment Programme (C-SHEP) farmers market in Rongai Township.

Grocery stores such as Kalimoni Greens in Karen, Zucchini at ABC Place, The Corner Shop at Diamond Plaza also sell organic food products. Chandarana Foodplus, Carrefour, and Tuskys retail outlets have organic food sections. Where tech meets food distribution deliveries; Mlango Farm, Sylvia Basket, Greenspoon, and Kalimoni Greens make doorstep deliveries.

The conservative dietary streak however, has not stopped a small but growing cluster of Kenyans who’ve begun exploring foreign dishes, newer urban cuisines, and flavours made accessible by online recipes, specialty meals, food carnivals and galas. For such a complex society Kenya makes up for a lack of unique and authentic Kenyan dish by constantly evolving its servings to meet the demands of a diverse community.

The Semiotics of Kitchen tools

Curiously, unlike in large swaths of the urban homes where citizens lay out elaborate cutlery, in many rural homes, eating with the hands is the norm in many households. That even pop culture icon Oprah Winfrey couldn’t fathom such cultural differences through her now infamous phrase ‘’I heard Indian people eat with their hands still” belies the hard to discard stereotypes.

The underlying belief being that eating with well-set cutlery as is the norm in modern homes is superior, more culturally evolved and sophisticated. These attitudes towards eating with hands is grounded in the never-ending war on germs and hygiene-related Non-Communicable diseases especially in our informal settlements.

This health concern isn’t farfetched given that the rapid growth in the use of cutlery partly acted as the definer of space among diners, and later on as a means of dealing with the disease outbreaks that hit rapidly urbanizing metropolis. Cutlery therefore went beyond practical consideration to being an indicator of space, safety, class, cultures and the relationship between man, place and food.

The kids too need to eat

The place of children in the food system is significantly evolved from the traditional open homes setups that had no delineation or gender. Progressively most modern food outlets have had to develop manned indoor play area with small pitches, swings, huts, and ball games to accommodate family and kid’s needs.

Children are major influencers on where a family eats, wine and dine in which little attention given to amusement, food variety, space, gifts, and furniture, paying off hugely. The centrality of the kid’s concerns to parents elevate their comfort as among the primary determinant of whether the family will patronize a food outlet.

Food considerations built for convenience of toddlers equals happy family dining experience, a key premium for most parents that equals great returns for the food business. Kids nutrition, their allergies, preferences are front and centre in the Kenyan family dining experience and while the children may not have the most sophisticated tastes they are very discerning eaters. The modern day dining experience whether in restaurants, homes or events have to prioritize the kids comfort, and palate, especially child-friendly focus over the weekends.

Eat Your Heart out

In the midst of all this Kenyans have to contend with the implication of industrial mass food production model of their top food preferences maize, milk, and wheat. Whether out of modern speeds, convenience or prices we’ve come to believe that we can feed our bodies industrial, processed foods in perpetuity.

It’s this prospect replicated over large swaths across the world that columnist Mark Hyman remarked,

‘In the 21st century our tastes buds, our brain chemistry, our biochemistry, our hormones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry.’

The Kenyan food industry tries to minimise losses even at the expense of consumers even as regulatory systems and institutions mandated to guarantee food safety such as Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (KEPHIS), Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) have capitulated to the tyranny of the rogue market. A core issue many Kenyans have to grapple with is the institutions mandated to monitor and ensure food safety understand that food systems are a national security issue.

Written and published with the support of the Route to Food Initiative (RTFI) (www.routetofood.org). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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