Israel and Kenya and the incurson

November 22, 2011
censorship, current affairs, Kenya, media, political processes
2 Comments

I want to write about this morning’s article by Macharia Gaitho. We are warned about giving into the seduction of Israeli involvement into the military incursion even the practical involvement of Israeli anti-terror squads as some of the justification of the war (protecting our interior by fighting outside it) would suggest.  Kenya has had a long standing relationship with Israel, and the kind of Zionism that can be found in the US, can also be found, in less apparent degrees, within Kenyans who have read too much Bible and not enough world news.

The power relations that surround the incursion, those exacerbated by Israel’s offer for help are described in the first paragraphs of the article:

From further afield, expressions of support from the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and various countries and regional blocs, must go beyond tepid words and “put their money where their mouths are”.

To be meaningful, support must translate into actual resources. The campaign needs money, bullets and soldiers on the battlefront.

Money will not be coming to Kenya in this war, I think a huge flaw in Gaitho’s thinking above is that it fails to address the possibility that there are readings to this incursion that other countries within the ‘international community” or the power paradigms where US is lord. We are “the man” in getting in there and doing the necessary work. Not every other country is down with this. I am even surprised that Gaitho added the US to that list of participants in an international community especially after the initial comments by the US Ambassador to Kenya in the early days of the incursion.

A friend of mine was very excited about the war because the US and Ethiopia and others had failed and the death toll of the first attack (75 people dead) promised that the Kenyan military’s prospects there would be more fruitful. This is why money is being asked for here: we need cash to buy bullets but foreign soldiers, not so much. And I think people should get to know about the intricacy of the stability pursuit in Somalia by the US (and possibly others, haven’t read much on that). In the classic US intelligence-thrown-money-at clusterfuck, one finishes Jeremy Scahill’s “Blowback in Somalia” with the feeling that, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars later, no one knows if what was done was right or worth it.

And it only turns out that Israel cannot join in the fun because they have their own issues with Palestine and Lebanon and that this could turn out to be a major PR disaster. Gaitho, in an articulation that is rare for a pro-war paper like DN gesticulates:

In any case, the ambassador was totally wrong in seeing similarities between the Kenyan operation in Somalia and Israeli experiences against hostile neighbours.

Kenya’s campaign is not one of occupation. It is not an invasion of Somalia and nor is it a land-grab.

The really huge problem I’m having is why Gaitho is so resistant to Israel helping in this war. Granted, we now share a thirst for blood, one which is not as well articulated or justifiable in Kenya as it is in the right leaning sections of the Israeli population. The article, for me, reveals the masculinist side of this war, the need to prove to the rest of East Africa and the world that this is a war in which the only privity to participate is support for the aspirations of the Kenyan state and nations. That is why, for instance, there is a lot of excitement when poorer nations (poorer than the US or France) declare their support for the war or when Museveni supports the war or when AMISOM troops start collaborating with the Kenyan military in fighting al-Shabaab. The ideological bases for the war are still very much policed, one gets a feeling of this when reading the article: we must keep watch, we must make sure this war is as sexy as possible. And from the comments as well, the latest one when I was typing this out: “Mr. Macharia, we also need patriotism in media reporting. Let media houses stop reporting for the sake of reporting. Is it possible to give black out to some aspects of international politics”.

Statement Against Kenya’s Military Incursion Into Somalia

October 26, 2011
Uncategorized
1 Comment

STATEMENT FROM KENYAN WRITERS AND PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS

We, the undersigned, register, in the strongest terms, our opposition to Kenya’s military incursion into Somalia.

We note that several months at minimum is required to plan a military operation that involves crossing borders. Therefore the reasons put forward by the Kenyan government for this operation are demonstrably false.

Statements from the French Government (see link below) and Medicins Sans Frontieres contradict the Kenyan Government’s allegation that Al-Shabaab is responsible for the kidnapping of Marie Dedieu and two other foreigners.

We will kill Somalis and call them Al-Shabaab. We will all feel very Kenyan indeed.

They die, so we can create a national amnesia about 350,000 internally displaced Kenyans, missing World Bank monies, missing Education Ministry funds, the ICC-Kenya trials, 2012 elections, the implementation of our new constitution.

The army will claim, as invading armies always do, that they have courageously engaged the enemy, when they have really killed innocent civilians.

Kenyans are paying already for this bout of blood-thirst. We will go on paying, for many years to come. We will pay with our taxes, our un-built schools and hospitals, our unpaid teachers, our still-jobless youth, our rapidly deteriorating security situation, our shattered relationship with our neighbours.

We do not require the death of Somalis to know who and where we are.

SIGNED: (in alphabetical order)

Nguru Karugu

Keguro Macharia

Paul Mwangi Maina

Tom Maliti

Dr. Firoze Manji

Abdulrahman Mirimo

Dr. Wambui Mwangi

Kenne Mwikya

Benjamin Wambua Ndolo

Onyango Oloo

Odhiambo Oyoko

Shailja Patel

REFERENCES:

France’s statement on the death of Dedieu:

http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/pays-zones-geo_833/somalie_383/franc.

With thanks to Shailja Patel, Wambui Mwangi and others whose thinking appears here.

Operation Linda Nchi

October 26, 2011
censorship, current affairs, Kenya, media, political processes
5 Comments

Sorry for the belatedness of this post, and that it doesn’t have any links.

The word “nchi” operates diversely in the current discourses on the army operation in Somalia which is ostensibly aimed at counteracting the security threat of Al-Shabab to not only Kenya’s coastline, a hub for tourism which contributes much to Kenya’s annual overall revenue but also Kenya’s interior territory. We are continually hearing about the presence of Al-Shabab members and “sympathisers” in refugee camps like Dadaab and in areas on Nairobi like Eastleigh, areas where members of various ethnic communities of Somalia and Northern Kenya are found.

Kabla ya kuendelea, ingekuwa vyema kujaribu kupeleleza maana ya neno “nchi” inavyotumiwa “nchini” katika maandishi na mazungumzo ya rejesta mbalimbali. Neno “nchi” lina maana gani, linatumiwa vipi na kwa njia gani? Katika kupa operesheni ya jeshi jina la “Linda Nchi”, serikali inataka tuchukulie operesheni hii vipi?

Whereas the definition of the Kiswahili word “taifa” is clearly, “nation” or “state” or an interplay of both, the word “nchi” has an ambiguity, I think, that enables it to be defined in a diverse set of ways, ways in which one cannot exactly, most of the time, point out. When thinking about Operation “Linda Nchi”, I find myself asking if it is really Kenya that is being protected and what this “protection” really means. “Nchi” can mean country but the ideological frameworks set up denote a mixing on territorial being and identifying and shared nationhood, a uniform nationalism in “supporting our boys” (though, I have heard, the troops sent to Somalia include both men and women but the phantasm of masculinity and the phallus in war and blood and violence and the sexual virility of men in uniform persists).

“Nchi” becomes a nation-space but, ingeniously, the whole logic of entering one’s other “nchi” to protects one’s own “nchi” does not pay attention to what meaning of “nchi” Somalis within and outside the Somali nation-space have. A while back, I came across a Somali LGBTI blog that covered issues of rights, the compatibility of homosexuality and religion and supporting each other as second generation immigrants within a foreign country. In an issue of The Hayly Telegraph, a daily literary magazine that ran during the Storymoja Hay Festival, Ellah Allfrey introduces us to Diriye Osman who brings in a queer side to Somali occupation of non-nation-spaces from a lesbian in south east London to a queer pre-adolescent in a refugee camp. Keguro writes, “I am surrounded by the dailyness of Islam. It feels nice, comforting” when he was recently in Nairobi. Visionary thinking and imagining abound in every direction.

All this is to say that I do not support militarism, it is sometimes a convenient sidestep of diplomatic channels, intellectual and public influences on thinking about security and ideologies with a certain space that impede peace and secure coexistence within another. For instance, I am continually shocked by the fact that while American and European weapons fuel Africa’s bloodiest wars and clashes, there exists strict weapon possession laws within America and Europe.

Which leads me to:

Kama sisi kweli ni “wananchi”, watu wanaoishi na wanaojenga na ambao ni nchi, ni njia zipi ambazo twaweza kutumia u-anainchi wetu katika kuimarisha hali ya nchi yetu?

Because I do not really believe in the project of defending nation-spaces without the input of those within these nation spaces and I want to think about how we can expand this input to thinking and acting. In fact, I think this operation is merely a ploy, a coercion on the part of Kenya to “do something” about the Al-Shabab threat and I continually question my role as a citizen when my right to “protection” which dangles between the nation-space I occupy and the nation-spaces that must be occupied for my “protection”. How does my identification with a singular nation-space, implied or not, function in a unilateral decision to carry out operations in another country without my express thinking or permission?

I get to finish up on this post on a day that has seen two explosions and the nerves of the nation has been deadened with paranoia, that liminal space before full swing patriotism and the unrepentant blood letting that comes soon after.

Even as the initial reasons for the military intervention unravel and we are left with a sense of raw and unsubstantiated patriotism and thirst for the Other’s blood, we have a choice on which way we can take. We can continue the military intervention, fighting a mysterious and not fully known entity that can disappear now and there only to re-emerge in the future here or we can pull out now and ensure that we have a working internal security mechanism that is sensitive to refugees (not what Rasnah Warah has been saying) and the “wananchi”, constantly bringing to the fore the humanity of all of us.

I hope not a lot of people will die as we make this choice.

Wangari and ambivalence

September 29, 2011
blogging, censorship, current affairs, feminism, Kenya, media, misogyny, political processes, social censorship, society, womyn
3 Comments

In her death, Kenya has come back to Wangari Maathai, pointing towards her struggles for the environment, human rights, the political hostility she faced in the Moi regime and the indifference she faced in the Kibaki led government, and we have even had the opportunity to acknowledge her unique and powerful ways of organizing women towards environmental issues, her eco-feminism.

And it is through these repeated invocations that Kenya has decided to mourn for Wangari, this “coming back” or “coming to” her politics as a necessary way of mourning her. Asking questions in this post becomes difficult and I repeatedly delete whole sections of what I write because I find them too quarrelsome, without solutions, there must never been unanswered questions in a eulogy.

But I must ask what this kind of mourning, of finding answers too quickly and of deciding that we have found Wangari within ourselves, within our politics means. Do we skip a very crucial aspect of mournful introspection when we decide that Wangari Maathai was an indomitable force within Kenya’s political narrative? After all these invocations, repeated statements done solemnly, incantations even, what next?

State House announces that Maathai will be accorded a state funeral and two days of national mourning marked by the flag flying at half mast (what the Daily Nation calls the “ultimate accolade”), I wonder what should be made of this especially when read against Wangari’s wishes not to be buried in a wooden casket something that I take to be against wishes of protocol of “respectability at all costs” and the all-too-persistent fact that Kenyan society is indifferent or even ignorant of the ecological/environmentalist movement.

I also want to delve into the possible readings of state patronage in this announcement of a state funeral for Wangari, an “ultimate accolade” accorded to “persons of national significance”. It is important for Kenyans to come around the previous strained relationship between Wangari and the state, her international prominence detached psychically with the Kenyan nation and her feminism which ran contrary to Kenya’s patriarchal government and society.

We are told that the family burial committee has been incorporated with the addition of officers from the government who will plan the funeral arrangements and align it with tenets of protocol. The familial (thinking of Wangari along family and kinship ties, against her achievements and success, her ex husband and a children are sometimes mentioned too many times) and the governmental (they always viewed her indifferently or with hostility) produce here an anxious moment for both feminists, environmentalists constantly rubbing shoulders with the government and the state which was indifferent or hostile, though sometimes yielding, to Wangari’s demands.

As we are once again subjected to the all too common anti-feminist narrative  of feminism as NGO-ised or feminism as being too “occidental”, I come back around my own feminist anger towards those who would not want Wangari’s work, whether environmentalist, human rights advocacy or pro-democracy to be thought of as having a feminist framework and background or feminist influences.

I am left undone by Keguro’s article on Wangari because it captures the space of possibility that the mourning protocols around Wangari continually fail in doing and my “righteous” feminist outrage that cannot address is. I cannot begin to imagine what the death of Wangari Maathai means to Kenya, to the world, to discourses on feminism and environmentalism, to women organizing against patriarchal, despotic and destructive leadership and to the detached, even negated, conscious citizen by the nation-state.

For a wonderful poem, tribute to Wangari and with ominous foreboding of the future, see Koroga’s wonderful poem by Marziya Mohammedali and Jerry Riley.

 

Wambui Otieno: circling and scrutinising

September 1, 2011
censorship, current affairs, feminism, Kenya, literary madness, media, misogyny, political processes, sex, sexuality, social censorship, society, television, womyn
5 Comments

What does increased surveillance – being watched – have to do with our sense of vulnerability? As children, our parents constantly remind us of this constant surveillance: our neighbours are watching and we should be careful of what we say and act, behave well or people will talk. In school, the threat of increased surveillance by figures of authorities (bullies, teachers, school prefects) shapes in many the power paradigm in such oppressive places. Being watched is being laid bare, someone lying in wait to see if you will make a mistake and pouncing on you just at the moment of that mistake, the moment of the vulnerability itself. We used to say that this sense of vulnerability was exacerbated by the surveillance but how far can that statement take us? It was already there, the person in authority noted signs of it and increased surveillance, and we just acted out the rest of the stuff generally.

When and how did our sense of community become so oppressive that human surveillance infringes so much on us that “being careful” or “behaving well” became acts of concealing and masking human vulnerability? How can we break the cycle that so inevitably gets us? When do we get to watch others probably because we are beyond being watched? What tropes of class consciousness, religiosity and different forms of hierarchisation do we go through in being watched and trying to watch?

Gays and lesbians are constantly being watched. This was one of the first things that I came to read when I was trying to learn about the queer community in Kenya. We are always being watched, always being laid bare and vulnerable by the government through the police, the religious sector and the all powerful family. I am tempted to say that the act of coming out in a society like Kenya’s where homophobia and forms of queer abuse are still rife and the body is still ruthlessly policed is an act of trying to break out of this vicious cycle of surveillance and counter-surveillance but its not, one is just subjected to a different, deeper kind of scrutiny.

A saying that I have heard is that one must not pay attention to gossip or rumour about him/herself when even in death people are continually talked about. This statement coalesces well with mourning and loss, not a transformative and deeply introspective process (a la Butler, Violence, Mourning, Politics) but a process by which we deflect our own sense of loss into the person we have lost. Mourning is never a taking stock of any kind, as if this taking stock is going to help us dispose off this person from our memories and emotions as quickly as possible or to mourn for the person faster and more conclusively. The “best” mourning, if such a thing exists (it doesn’t) is the process by which we search for the person’s imprint in ourselves, a process that takes times, with varied results but adequately caters (though we may not know it) to knowing much about ourselves.

It is with this background that I come to the death and the subsequent mourning protocols of Wambui Otieno, Kenyan feminist, Mau Mau veteran and political activist. I have read most of the obituaries, if you could call them that, of Wambui in the newspapers, watched her feature in the news for the past day and all this comes up short. But I have to ask, how do nations mourn a singular person? How do we come to this much contoured sensation? What does this say about national melancholia?

I came to know about Wambui Otieno when she made the news after getting married to a man who was 42 years younger than her thus subverting an age old practice in patriarchal Kenya where old wealthy and respectable men married very young women or girls. At that time, the only varying opinion other than that of the media was that of the people around me and a lot of people who circled around her newfound infamy. The media coverage was considerable, much more extensive than what I see now. Even as we now come back to trying to circulate around her, a keen eye brings us to the patriarchy that circulates over us who circulate around Wambui. The news is drenched with bending-over-backward brief pieces on her life and work, with the rest of the airtime spent on describing kinship ties and what her family is doing for funeral arrangements and burial plans.

And burial plans are a powerful point of anxiety in this scenario. Considering the long court battle of Wambui Otieno and the Umira Kager clan and the subsequent re-marrying of Wambui to a younger, less socioeconomically enfranchised man, it remains to be seen for the next few days the kind of coverage about Wambui’s death will elicit.

And I also want to acknowledge the ethnocentrism in the room, how it comes up in ubiquitous ways. I would never want to see the court case in 1987 outside the realm of feminism thought. I think the best work on the case then and now remains how it was articulated according to feminist theory. There is a deeply deeply flawed kind of thinking that wants to pit the Umira Kager clan against the Waiyaki family, ostensibly the Luo versus the Kikuyu and I am worried about the kind of intimacy which Wambui Otieno was angling for back in 1987 that this kind of thinking consciously tries to do away with. I am worried about the patriarchy it does not want to unsettle.

Scholars and intellectuals have written extensively on the S M Otieno case which was keenly viewed by African feminists all around Africa. I am highly grateful of such investments in feminist circles, it reminds me that there is hope in a future where feminist thinking will be taken more seriously and will have a more active role in shaping events and policies.

What is the meaning of the deep scrutiny of Wambui, pre and post-humus? What does it bring the whole nation to in knowing and searching within itself for the imprint of Wambui Otieno? This is a question that should be taken seriously in that it reveals a lot about the ways in which national mourning and watching singular figures operates. I don’t think there is ever anything conclusive or even productive that comes of out of surveillance. It is an authoritarian approach for a community or group of people to give a set of rules and then watch itself go around these rules. It is dangerously narcissistic. When Wambui stepped out of this sense of communal navel-gazing, she was given into more scrutiny, more personal details about her life.

I am wary of the actions that want to deem mourning as anything less than trying to place her in Kenya’s history and I am also wary of the evading of crucial topics such as feminism and Mau Mau and the blanket of patriarchy that is always circling above, the scrutiny that always looks deep within but has nothing to add to our sense of mourning or thinking on vulnerability.

I thank Wambui Otieno for her life, work and the influence she continues to have on my thinking.

Also, Keguro Macharia on Gukira has a really nice piece on Wambui Otieno. Read, it’s nice

letter and spirit

August 22, 2011
blogging, censorship, current affairs, dialectic, feminism, Kenya, media, misogyny, political processes, queer Africa, sexuality, social censorship
1 Comment

How are we to go about with the process of implementing the provision in the constitution that compels elective bodies to have at least one third representation of either gender? Last week, it was said that cabinet had discussed the issue and termed it “impossible” to implement then “impractical” and now, it would seem, time consuming and difficult to devise a plan that would effect this important provision. On the backdrop of this is that we had some women rights activists talking about the setting up of some areas as exclusively elect-women-only areas, an idea which came up short in espousing the democratic beliefs Kenyans have. For now, this is the biggest amo that people who are against this provision are using to lambast, among other things, the participation of women at every turn.

We normally invoke this saying “letter and the spirit of the law” or “letter and the spirit of the constitution” to proclaim our sense of constitutionalism, a belief of both the intent of its writers (the spirit) and that what is tangibly in writing in the constitution (the letter) tries to convey, to the farthest extreme possible, the intent of the writers. Indeed, we have been reminded time and time again by the Constitutional Implementation Commission, the Parliamentary Committee on the Implementation of the Constitution and by the retiring Attorney General that we need the spirit of the constitution to be alive and thriving, within ourselves in the form of a strong sense of constitutionalism, so that the constitution does not become a mere document, a piece of paper, the letter in itself.

But as one comes to learn, the letter is the antithesis to the spirit of the law (the thesis) when subjected to everything I have just said in the second paragraph of this post. If one must fix oneself squarely on either end of the binary (letter versus spirit/thesis versus antithesis), then he must be against what is on the other end.

Much of this can be said about the one third provision demanded by the constitution. But we could stop here and expand the concepts of “letter and spirit of the constitution” in thinking about what was happening a year ago during the referendum. What had Kenyans had in mind when voting to pass the constitution? Given, a lot of people hadn’t read all of the constitution and even those who read it read it against the belief that it was something that would try to settle past injustices, reconceptualise the future into that which justice, democracy and humanity (ahem, human rights) would be its core precepts. Even for those who didn’t read it, the constitution offered hope, a new start and was something that we could use when the political class in Kenya failed us completely. We were breaking a cyclic retinue of choosing leaders, being failed by leaders and choosing these same leaders over again. Most people looked to the spirit of the constitution during the referendum and this was because of some factors like a) badly carried out civic education and b) corrupt rhetoric of the political and clerical class. In retrospect, then, most Kenyans have a sense more of what the spirit of the constitution demands; they live by it and would ultimately base their judgement upon it.

We can say, under certain circumstances such as during the referendum, that constitutionalism fixed itself squarely as the spirit of the constitution, its intention, the tenets that it based itself upon even though we didn’t know (and some of us still don’t know) what these tenets or founding principles were or how they have been put down in writing. The spirit, it can be said, is regardless of the letter.

For those who are taking the recommendation by some activists that there should be in place areas where only women candidates would compete during elections as the only idea brought forth by the whole lot of those who are in support of this provision, or that this is the best idea that feminists, pro-feminists and women’s rights activists can and only bring forward, then we need to address the question of patriarchy to a better extent. We need to see how sexism, misogyny and hetero-patriarchy seem to grow out of or within our sense of democracy, especially parliamentary democracy. We need to see how they co-exist within an “egalitarian” democracy to the extent that one can hold patriarchal and democratic views within the same statement and still be correct under the current terms.

By taking a single, concept and imagining a wide range of people, beliefs and interpretations of the constitution as endorsing it in a way or another is engaging in a generalising form of anti-feminism, even misogyny. Those who refuse to devise or think about other ways with which we can effect this provision refuse intellectualism among other ways around the issue a chance at solving the problem while those who see no other way of thinking about the participation of both men, women and also persons of undefined/non-conforming gender in the political establishment, engage with the same anti-democracy they seek to get rid off in thinking about the constitutional provision.

I argue that the only way out of this is the dialectic “synthesis”; we must use the spirit of the constitution to determine what the letter of the constitution will be. We can decide that the constitutional provision will not be as easy to work with, but we must also decide how this action will disrupt (and even corrupt) the spirit of the constitution. We can also think about ways in which the constitutional provision can and must work, what democracy in Kenya should or would be if we were to have the elect-women-only areas, the gutting that patriarchy/sexism would take so that this would be possible.

For now, we watch. The cabinet says it will be looking into ways in which this provision can work and this is another opportunity, like lots of others brought about by the constitution, with which we can use to think about a lot of things, get to know a lot of tools and concepts and ideologies which are to be used in bringing about change in Kenya via the new constitution. I hope a lot of people get to think about what this provision means, for women, for democracy and for the future of this country.

 

famine porn

August 19, 2011
blogging, censorship, current affairs, literary madness, media, political processes, social censorship, television
5 Comments

What aspects of famine porn can be found in porn in general and what cultural and political tools do we use to register, acknowledge or scrutinise these similarities? I start with this question because it is fundamental, in a way, when it comes to thinking about other people’s suffering, which is far away and detached from our present living and the need for images, videos and texts that approach this feeling of anxiety and detachment to approach it in a kind of way that does not convey the very sentiments it tries to get rid of but also which is not “porn”.

The first thing we know about pornographic material in general is that it is easily accessible and that we have all kinds of it, porn which tries to cater for every possible taste. There is a lot of porn to go around and we should stop and take a look at why we have so much. Is it an attempt to register complexity, diversity, and commonality or is it an industry with too much commodity? What about the quality of porn? I attest to the state of really bad porn out there and the average stuff which everyone watches and the really good stuff which one quickly realises is actually some sort of niche for oneself. My good porn may be trash jerk-off-for-five-minutes for you, that’s a major character of porn these days and this is without considering the various categories of porn (categorised in sexuality, gender, class, fetish, genre etc). I am speaking about aesthetics, plot lines, characters, conveyance….

And it with this understanding that one can use to dispute “famine porn”. Considering the Somalia/East Africa big famine story right now, what can we say about the images from that place, or emaciated kids and parents, dead livestock, heavily cracked earth and the total suffering and despondency of these people? These images move us to do something, say something. We consciously work around these images not only because of the fact that they are easily accessed – just by the click of the remote/computer mouse/phone scroll keys/touch pads – but also because of how they are used over and over again as the “story”, not nuanced, simply to about and invocative of our own sense of vulnerability and injurability.

There is also a certain kind of ingenuity that comes about from how famine porn is presented. If porn accords us the freedom of choice by offering a wide selection, then famine porn essentially destroys this very freedom of choice by giving a singular story of suffering. If you look well at the photos coming from Somalia, there are very few differences between them, the malnourished kid, his mother desperate, forlorn, heavy silence in the videos only shattered by a child crying for food, starved old men and women who… They basically tell us the same thing and for the same reason, a commonality of the message by its bearers calls for a commonality of response. We are all supposed to react in the same way, do something tangible like donate money and not sit behind a desktop and make note of all the stupid shit that got us here in the first place.

And I should note that this is the only freedom of choice that we lose when negotiating with the people affected by famine. Indeed, beggars are not choosers, those of us donating make every crucial choice from who to help, where, how, through what organisation and under what social/political/economic considerations.

We could also talk about how people consume porn. If anything, there is a lot of porn because we consume it a lot. The pictures I downloaded yesterday or the videos I picked up last week lose their salt very quickly and I have to go for other materials again. It is a never ending cycle of insatiability. Can we say this about famine porn too? One of my biggest worries in this whole scenario is the photos, essentially “the story”, losing their sense of urgency really fast, to the extent that I am not compelled by it anymore, it does not call me to do something about it. I wonder how long it will take before people start talking about the aesthetic value of, say, Tyler Hicks’s photo on the New York Times. I guess this also has to do with the message in itself. If this is the only story coming out of the famine situation, then this reimagining of the images as something worth other than “the message” brings us to new territories not adequately represented in the analogy of image as text (and text here means the true conveyer of the message or, a message such as the drought crisis, biased as that sounds).

The saying “a picture tells a thousand words” carries various meanings when thinking about the photos in Somalia, chief among them being that these a thousand words are not enough or that the commodification of pictures in terms of texts does great injustice to written form, which is less likely to lose taste and become famine porn (or because it is famine porn) and is likely more capable of handling scrutiny and criticism simply because the question of message versus aesthetics or art is not availed to us presently. Criticism of photographs does not give us this choice. If we hate the message, what about the other side of the photo?

There is no single (or even unidirectional) way to get to human suffering but I only mention it so much here because it is where stories like the one about drought seem to be tending to. And we might stop over here, also, to talk about why we seem to be so invested into finding out how any specific kind of suffering works yet we do such a bad job of trying to alleviate it. There is fierce critique about the state of famine porn and how it singularly covers suffering in the global south and I wonder whether it is the best way to also try and include the west into it as if a blanket feature of famine porn is what we need not its total destruction. What might it mean to mention or invoke images of hunger/starvation, malnutrition from the United States or Europe? What does it aim to do other proclaim a sense of hypocrisy in the famine porn business, a proclamation far inferior to that of the fact that this whole thing is a hot mess?

This post is courtesy of Judith Butler’s “Violence, Mourning, Politics” which is of great help when thinking about these things. And I wonder: what if we had images where human (not African human or European human) vulnerability and injurability brought us to action. What if the symbolic, cultural or political caption of this image would bring us around the fact that this can happen to us, that life is precarious and that we need better ways of addressing this suffering that does not prolong it, obscure it with our own sense of ego and melancholia? Maybe images would function better if we had this in place. For now, though, the textual remains the only place where this is possible.

#kenyans4kenya and why i’m not getting all the hype about charity

July 31, 2011
current affairs, Kenya, media, political processes
9 Comments

The Kenya4Kenyans charity initiative is many things, if one is going to think along the lines of naming other than the standard ideological and political ramifications of aid, charity and the conscientious corporate. It appeals to Kenyans and to Kenyan-ness and tries, some might say successfully, to ideally think about public initiative – a large group of people coming together for a worthy cause. In another place, a Facebook status update triumphantly declares that the likes of Geldof are not coming and that Kenyans have come together in a big feat of saving their fellow brothers and sisters in the arid areas of Kenya (as you may have noticed, Somalia is treated carefully Al-Shabab and all). On radio, as I was getting a matatu ride to town on Friday, we hear harrowing tales of infants suckling on their mother’s breasts while she is already dead or of people dying as they wait to be served food. TV is littered with dead carcases and emaciated men, women and children begging for help. On my way back home, another radio show tells us to just donate what we can and not to start a “blame game” which would, ostensibly, take the focus away from the dead and dying in Turkana.

I am thinking on the variety of ways in which charity (corporate and individual) have become intrinsic to the way we both view capital as configured along the lines of the individual and the corporate. Žižek is definitely helping with a lecture series entitled “First as Tragedy, then as Farce”. The question remains, under what imperatives and at what cost have we come to view the concept of charity as ideal to the socio-economic situations within which we find ourselves? Even the welfare state wobbles under such scrutiny.

At last count, the Kenyans for Kenya campaign had collected more than 60 million Kenya shillings from individual well wishers but what has the likes of Safaricom, the Nation Media Group and others collected? I expect a lot but what is conspicuous from all this is the very small recognition they have got out of it. Yes, they arranged for it in a large media campaign and yes we expect them to take it all the way when it comes to advertising but what I’m concerned about is what comes apparent at the end of the above video, that the individuals sending as little as 10 shillings are relieved of the problem or even express some forms of moral outrage at those who have not donated anything for one reason or the other. What kinds of conflating, economically and socially, have led to a view in which “Kenyans” are “for Kenya” when they donate money to this initiative? It raises the question of the nationalism and patriotism and affirmative sense of goodwill that is at play here while effacing other questions of how we got to such a situation.

The writing was on the wall more than six months ago and we had everyone reading and interpreting it but, in some way or the other, the famine still got to us and we are all over sudden told not to think about these facts. We are cautioned against consciously engaging with the government’s utter failure to adequately address the looming famine long before it got to such extremes because we will be susceptible to some sort of blame game. A blame game demands at least a two participants, preferably antagonistic extremes, that constantly blame each other for the current state of woes while at the same time bringing into the argument their own sense of exoneration and possible solutions to the problem at hand. In the current drought and famine situation, who engages in this blame game? Considering a binary of corporate, individuals and aid groups versus the government, how does this blame game work? If the public is engaging in the blame game, it implies their stake in what Kenyans in the arid areas facing drought are going through, a stake that is not defined conventionally but hangs precariously in moralist, nationalist and possibly thinly articulated forms of anti-imperialism (the Geldof detractors come to mind). What would the government blame Kenyans in this crisis for doing or not doing?

Indeed, what if all this money wasn’t donated, what if all that food was consumed instead of being sent? Would we be in any position to be blamed for the current state of death and despair? The unfortunate answer, according to predominant paradigms in the idea of consumerist charity, yes.

I have argued amongst friends that sending money or donating foodstuffs to this relief effort is like throwing a blank cheque at the problem, addressing a problem in ways that relieve us of the heavy burden of asking what really caused this situation or what can comprehensively be done about it while patting ourselves on the back for “helping these people”. The blending of charity and consumerism is hypocrisy simply because, to communists like Žižek, as we help these people whom we seem to have compunction if not obligation to help, we fail to notice the overarching fact that it is the same socio-political and economic way of doing things that has caused all this suffering in the first place. In fact, the charity business is intrinsically softening the blow of this fact if not to deprive us of that knowledge in the first place.

Under the current conditions, we should feel compelled to give out to charity and hope that the little we have will make a big change – it seems that it is the only thing that we can do. We should do it without illusions, that this campaign is not anything exceptional from what have been the tenets of giving and we are not doing something that will define the political imperatives of “collective responsibility” or “government accountability” for years to come. We should give out to charity with full knowledge of the fact that Kenya does not have a working system that ensures the country has food security and that the levels of corruption in decision making bodies ensured that the famine being experienced came to this extreme. We should donate with the knowledge that the famine in the arid North and North East (including other areas) is an extension of a capitalist hierarchised sense of priorities that not only marginalises people from, say, Turkana but also calls for when and how we can react to their anguish and despair. A good question to ask would be: what do I have that this person doesn’t and how can I do to change this in that this person never needs to beg for food again? Our donations should be accompanied by calls and agitation for more openness in government decision making bodies that will ensure more “productive” public participation, more transparent monitoring of progress and better understanding of the plight of people going through such forms of suffering. We shouldn’t give into the lame symbolism that our charity reveals a higher sense of public awareness or participation, instead we should demand better use the taxes collected by government.

LOOKING FOR KATO: A Conversation on the Death of David Kato.

July 26, 2011
Uncategorized
5 Comments

My friend Amil Khassim and I embarked on a long conversation on email about the death of Ugandan Activist David Kato and what it entails for queers and queer rights activists in the East Africa region. We dally with present attitudes about queer Uganda as seen through Kato and his death and delve into a queered future, as it were, governed by a sense what Kato stood for and how he went about this “standing for”. I am extremely proud of this discussion piece, it brought to surface a lot of things and I am thankful to Amil for this opportunity

Amil:

A few days after David Kato died; a friend in New York told me he’d attend a Requiem Mass for him in a church in Harlem. Frank Mugisha, the very popular queer activist was in New York, and had met up with my friend for a chat… that was one of the things that brought that initial shock. I instantly realized this man’s influence.

Then, I met up with another friend in town who said he’d been to the burial; that gay men wore rainbow shirts, and there was quite the fight for his body by them. His neighbours abandoned his corpse, but the gay men were persistent in claiming it and eventually burying him.

It made me think about honour.

He was honourable, you know?

The fact that death has been much of a theme in my poetry, and in a way, much of the philosophy I’ve read, I take a more critical approach to his death. The man’s death was quite mysterious. For crying out loud, people just said he was beaten up to death.

No one publicly, was arrested or charged for murder.

Indeed, many have forgotten who David was.

Whereas, for many queer men, his death was a shocking revelation of their fate. I’m sort of ambiguous about this, because I felt that visibility was important, and as such projects like these curated by the Makerere University have emerged. I think death has a way of bridging meaning with nonsensical aggression. Trust me, I’m not one for war and clamour, but people always find themselves seeing a person at death.

If they’ve forgotten him, they won’t forget other homosexual men. If they’ve been trying to kill someone else, all that has been blown by the death of David Kato. Even, the tabloids that had printed lists and lists of queers couldn’t laugh at his death, you know?

But in a way, it just kind of means there’s a lot to learn. More research needs to be done about queer men and their lives in this country. Just one person’s life shined so brightly that it illuminated several hundreds.

I think many of the queer men I know, love to hide; or dwell in the shadows, because they’ve been programmed to feel that way about homosexuality. In fact, they hardly claim it. But the death of David sort of outed them to themselves, which the Bill didn’t manage to do, in fact, the only person who seems to have been killed from direct unrest caused by the Bill is David Kato himself; a sacrificial death.

 

Kenne:

The process of recognising Kato, or his death, as an instant world phenomenon, for me, didn’t happen. I guess I followed much around his death on international media, getting the details, shady as they were, around what really happened. I was transfixed, however, as his name and his death brought a huge number of people and organisations together, even Obama and Clinton took time to say something about his death. But somehow, thinking about the wide ranging internationalisms around his death, especially in respect to reactions by people and organisations, I find that mourning him as queer Kenyan, an East African, was especially hindered.

I guess for me, his impact as a queer activist came when I read this article on the Daily Nation in Kenya which grossly misrepresented him. I was quick enough to realise that I needed to refuse being influenced by his legacy as painted by the media, both local and, to some extent, international and thus the process of coming to terms with his death and thinking clearly about our loss started taking place. Then I watched the trailer for a documentary entitled “Call Me Kuchu” and saw him speak for the first time, him among many other queers mapping out and living a life which has a potentially violent predestined death and I was awed by not only his courage but of the courage he represented when he dared to be as “out” as possible, as courageous as possible. If you trail the many news articles and general pathology of queer (or homophobic) Uganda after his death, his death is invoked as betraying the dehumanised aspect of queer life in Africa. He is a lone figure in thousand upon thousands of articles. Only a small number of people, a depressingly few lot, have come out and said that Kato was part of a wide network of African queer activists.

 

Amil:

I find that quite peculiar too, that many people didn’t mourn him. It was something quite out of the ordinary to think of a relation to the man. Many people were frankly disturbed by the news. Perhaps that alone created a kind of anaesthesia…

 

Kenne:

Generally, I think one can say that Kato’s death, or any murder of a queer identified person within Uganda, was bound to happen after sometime. We can say that we ‘affected’ queers tried to preclude mourning, to beat it’s descent upon us to the punch though we maintained a huge fight against AHB and other anti queer pogroms within the country. His death was an ‘un-shock’ and every effort taken against this very finality, queer death, we realise, was an instance of mourning in itself. So when I watched this unfolding event, it was familiarising myself with something I’d thought about countless times and prepared myself for. Needless to say, this too is a kind of mourning, reflecting on his life and work is the best we can do now.

 

Amil:

More than anything else, this email allows me to grieve for the death of a gay man. Not something I usually do, but I pay my deepest respects and condolences to the soul and the family of the late David Kato.

I honour him, so that his work may not go unnoticed.  He did quite a lot for those men and women who are daily persecuted in this country and elsewhere in East Africa.

I mourn the death of a man who would not compromise his deepest feeling for fear’s sake. A man who stood up for others, honouring their humanity and considering their well-being. I celebrate the life and work of David Kato.

 

Kenne:

How was his death perceived by Ugandans in general? I come back to this question because it is so integral to what we have come to see as East Africa’s activist culture. In extension, the question would maybe be “how does the public come to terms with activists and activism in general”?

I don’t want to believe that we have come to the end of the discussion because I think that talking about Kato’s influence on where today’s politics are moving is something that must be addressed before we move on. Underneath a huge overlay of invocations of his death linked with the “hopeless” situation in Uganda are people, like the organisers of this project, who are genuinely concerned with his legacy, want to take issue with this notion that his demise as another mantle upon which the pathologisation of queer/homophobic Uganda takes place. Sokari Ekine said that Makerere University has a lot of progressives and thus the possibility and actualisation of this project, could there be more to this? All this in light of the fact that you didn’t study at Makerere, of course.

 

Amil:

Well, activism, the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change, always has a beginning. I’m curious about how queer activism started in Uganda.

A couple of years ago, queer men, women and activists had a demonstration walk with banners along the main high street in Kampala. Although, when I recalled the incident in my poetry, I wrote that the incident was futile, because my concerns were about psychological and emotional well-being.

Pathologically, queer activism is chiefly concerned with the law, or how the law functions. In my humble opinion, the lives of queer men and women have been too obscured, textured, layered and complex to be outrightly seen or engaged with the law of this country.

Again, it goes back for me to personal experience; whether or not changing a law could stop a child in boarding school from being raped. If anything, that would continue even further if queers are not given a more human face. Dehumanization of queers seems to be the attack, but the retaliation seems to be humanization of the constitution, instead of queers themselves.

It’s kind of how, the word queer, originally derogatory and abusive by the others, was turned  around by gay men in modern usage in a more positive light within their circles, to take the power out of it’s negative connotations.

It’s all well and good for the law to be concerned with queers. I have no qualms with that. But if we’re speaking about the law, we’re not speaking philosophically. We’re not engaging ourselves with the mind of the individual.

Again, I realize that activism is aimed at a public from a public. With two or three exceptional (activists) all of whose personal lives are somewhat irrelevant to their actions in political colloquialisms. I have liked the activism/work of one Kenyan woman, Asunta Wagura who came out with a humanist regard for women living with HIV. She put a face on the woman living with HIV that wants to have children, and well, it raised a storm but eventually created a loving community of women that care for each other’s health and that of their families.

The trouble I feel, is that many activists do not have neither the intriguing chance to be tied between the law and to be persecuted maliciously, nor do most of them have the voice that communicates through writing.

I am a writer. Have been honing my craft for a few years, and I have to say that writing is not easy. Communication is not easy. But I think, and with factual knowledge, understand that Wagura did exactly that. She communicated to large number of people through her writing and uncompromising views.

 

Kenne:

So, the problem is that we have activists and we do not have yet an adequate representation of queer in which people could look to not for answers but as a stop on their way to positively articulating queer? Communication is a very difficult thing, especially when we want some kind of feedback. There is this argument that homosexuality is such a big thing in Africa, partly, because people don’t talk about it. Obviously, the easiest way out of this would be talking about it but when you go back even to those days when homosexuality was a not-to-speak-of taboo, we had people who talked about it. Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta wrote that it did not exist in Kenya and Moi, the second president, said that it shouldn’t exist by saying that the Bible spoke against it. These are powerful voices. We could add lots of African leaders who, for those who didn’t clearly speak against homosexuality, proposed, imposed and encouraged notions of compulsory heterosexuality which had its clear consequences and implications.

What you have said about Asunta can also be said about Kato. He was not a person, to me, soaked into privilege and respectability, he was controversial, he was openly gay and he communicated his views uncompromisingly and from his videos, I have seen that he had a lot of wit to add to his confidence. Did he communicate? The question is complicated because his death has become so phenomenal. What he was and what his death has become, what it has brought, are now two different things. I think what can now be said is that his death is slowly sending a hopeful message, not exactly affirmative but I think there are now clear efforts to placate his views and his death in something other than this environment in which he thrived, one of institutionalised homophobia. That, for me, is both necessary and the right step. What will David Kato become after we have fully realised LGBTI rights in Uganda? If you expound on that question, there are a lot of pauses and one has to go back to exactly what David Kato said, what his views were, to try and think through it in line with the present conditions. To try and structure it now, you could ask; did David live in utter hopelessness of the situation in Uganda? and the answer is no because this is a person who had a lot of hope and belief in a redemptive way, that Uganda will have to change for the better after some time. That is his biggest gift to those of us who have remained behind, that is his greatest communication both in life and in his death.

 

Amil Khassim is a poet, and thinker on queer theory in the arts.

Kenne Mwikya is a queer Kenyan blogger and commentator

satire post

July 21, 2011
blogging, censorship, current affairs, Kenya, literary madness, media, political processes, social censorship, society, television
Leave a Comment

Satire has had a very long history, a history which, for the most part, has gone on to make valid its autonomy, creativity and necessity given the varying periods of time it has flourished. Satire has flourished in times of political and social repressions which also alternated with creative and artistic implications resulting from such repression. It was borne out of a sense of trying to point out such and such inadequacies among the ruling class, religious institutions or the public at large but not having necessarily the willingness to go all the way. The biggest issue with satire, for me, is whether this non-duality has whittled down the necessary force of criticism or the willingness by “the public” and others to issue or articulate forceful criticisms. Of course, autonomy takes care of this question, satire is in itself an art and must be treated as such, and there is a need to think satire as an autonomous mode of subversion.
If satire is autonomous and invokes its own modalities when it comes to making a critique of it effectively effacing any standards by which we might judge its work that are presently with us, how are people concerned with its effect in the world over going to make critical sense of it?
What is the true objective of satire, if such a thing exists? I keep going back to this question as I was reading this brilliant paper which, ostensibly, just outlines satire as it is, a trope in which knowledge has been and continues to be shared over time. This leads me to another question altogether, in light of the circumstances in which we find ourselves in today, do we need satire at a time when more forceful criticisms of the status quo are necessary?
It is true that some contexts, may it be lack of media freedom necessitated by socio-political repression or sensitivity of information, leads the public and artists to satire as a means conveying knowledge in a way that sidesteps censorship but it is also too careless not to think about how censorship caused by repression or carried on by public expectations work. What is acceptable and what is not? I may stop here for a moment and note that any satirical work that asks this question is on the right track and which answers the question in a subversive way sets itself apart.
It is with this grounding that I come to the XYZ show which recently concluded its fourth season. Has it effectively asked the question, what is acceptable and what is not? And has it answered it in a way that radically changes the game when it comes to criticism as perceived in Kenya? Season 4 of the show assumed a post-ethnocentric Kenya (or at least the show’s writers are). It focussed on the Ocampo Six, the president, the prime minister and the vice president, Gaddafi, Obama, Museveni, pitting them in a myriad of funny positions and subjecting them to wide ranging situations. The script is bitingly conscious of the contempt that such leadership as the Ocampo Six have on Kenyans, or at least on Kenyans who do not follow or completely repudiate their rhetoric. The show constantly projects this contempt back to them displaying them as being completely out of touch with the general public’s psych, their utterances forced upon the audience by the media. Of course, we don’t change the channel because it’s all totally funny and parodic.
Exactly what do we get out of from this show? We could say that it has a no holds barred approach to its characterisation (Kalonzo is treated harshly by the writers, I like that) but the question will always be whether we can sit down some other time and think about these scenes in relation to all the bullshit around Kenya’s mainstream political discourses at the time.
Perhaps the producers and writers at XYZ show are operating a whole different level. Maybe they see politics in Kenya as too serious an issue. Indeed, they allude much of their stuff to tense discussions about Kenya’s political scene and maybe this is some sort of radical break-away from Redikyulass, the Kenyan comedy show produced in the final years of Moi’s rule which today would be totally kiss-ass with its stereotyping of ethnic groups and a ndombolo dancing president.

Thinking about the object of satire is compelling but also marred with unnecessary complexity and I have been unable to go through it without making it sound totally unfunny. We cannot effectively dispute for whom satire is for without invoking notions of class (who knows, who doesn’t/who deserves to know, who doesn’t). We cannot critique satire in relations to other forms of critique without disregarding its pivotal role during times when freedom of speech or freedom of repression were not availed to the public, to artists and to commentators. We can, although, talk about the huge presence of satire in literary criticism and its scarce mentioning in areas concerned with politics, subversion, revolutions etc.
Finally, as I have been incapable of thinking of others ways to think about satire, I come to a compromise. Satire is a big thing in the west where it is sometimes coupled with strong and forceful criticisms. It has come in handy, though too weakly, in post-9/11 America which grappled with censorship, anti-intellectualism and the refusal to listen to anything other than the explanation that “the terrorists” bombed US because they are jealous or possibly afraid of American democracy. XYZ show came out of thinking how a puppet political satire show popular in France could work in Kenya.
So I guess that’s it. Satire may not be necessarily criticisms and doesn’t need to be judged as such. Satire and criticism are in may ways separate which allows them to work autonomously with differing ways but the same ends. My main problem, and bias, is when satire takes control but other than that, it’s ha-ha all the way.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.