"At home, I was socialised Gikuyu. Not the Gikuyu of We the Gikuyu- that doesn’t exist, anymore, outside of national politics- but Gikuyu according to my family. It was a Gikuyuness, like for most, nuanced principally by the brand of Christianity it had been filtered through. Outside of home, my Gikuyuness encountered that of others but important of all I came face to face with jaruo, maragori, kare-jini and other Beasts from the West."
*Bloggers cut from a work in progress. Other excerpts and thoughts under #PoBo link on the Black Campaign website.
Follow @matathia on Twitter and #PoBo
Monday, March 29, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Wanaume Hufanya
“After my weekly psychiatric self examination,” I am saying to N.M., “I like to take the time it takes to smoke a gaff to contemplate the meaning of life.” This seems to stretch his mind like a miraa high for a bit before he starts to bang on the rolled up window of Dinda’s moti of the day.
“Wee, Dinda, huyu boyz amejidai nani raundi hii…?”
“Kaa sii condom…” Dinda yells back rolling the window back up, “usinisumbue.”
“You see that, Potash,” N.M. turns to me, “The man with the takeaway in the mots is my kind of man. And clearly he has no time to contemplate the meaning of life with you. And neither do I.” He fishes, in his jeans for a pack of Sportos. What’s with the Calvin Klein pipe and pointed boots, I wonder, giving him a once over.
“Is that Kenyan Marlboro man or post modern Gikuyu?” I ask him. “I thought khakis, brown loafers and a Bonk tshirt is the look of your Nairobi?”
“It is Friday night, Potash,” he sounds agitated, “and you are talking too much gay shit while all I want to hear is ‘do me… do me… oga my broda…la la la la la la…’”
“Smack that, yani,” I laugh, “Shaking it like in the Akon video lakini you jua how that shit plays out when you do the horizontal.”
“I know what you mean,” he smiles, “and those are the weighty issues of men. If you must contemplate anything…” He pauses to stuff a wad of leaves into his mouth and bite a G.
“Is how,” I interrupt, “you are kulaing goks these days?”
“If you must contemplate anything, Potash,” he stares me in the eye, “it is the fate of some pussy with your name on it that is at this moment katikaing huko Molly’s.”
Half-lifing me the gaff, he says, “No guts, no morning glory! So will you be man enough, as Conrad says, to face the darkness? And that is all the difference between a thinking man and a doing man on a Nairobi night.” Then he started to walk off towards Qs.
“By the way,” he said turning around, “seeing that you have all this time to think…” He laughed and started walking back towards me. “Frankly, I can see how you can find the time, I mean, jerking off is what… one minute… like short time and then you are back to the cogitations in lieu of production; living out their existential angst- real and imagined- instead of writing that is your kind of artist?
This is Nairobi, not New Fuck.” He was, briefly interrupted by a lupa dawg, whoz happening and one armed hug from a street boy. “Fucking Westlands,” I say to myself, “Didn’t like Tupac die?”
“Listen Potash” N.M. said walking towards me and offering me a cigarette. “In the time it takes for you to smoke that cigarette,” he mocked, “why don’t you ponder over what your online avatar does on Friday nights. You know, when you are offline in that hovel of yours writing shit that don’t mean shit.
He is a Kenyan man, No? Mwanaume hufanya.”
“Wanawake,” The street boy, still hovering around, said and walked off after N.M.
“Wee, Dinda, huyu boyz amejidai nani raundi hii…?”
“Kaa sii condom…” Dinda yells back rolling the window back up, “usinisumbue.”
“You see that, Potash,” N.M. turns to me, “The man with the takeaway in the mots is my kind of man. And clearly he has no time to contemplate the meaning of life with you. And neither do I.” He fishes, in his jeans for a pack of Sportos. What’s with the Calvin Klein pipe and pointed boots, I wonder, giving him a once over.
“Is that Kenyan Marlboro man or post modern Gikuyu?” I ask him. “I thought khakis, brown loafers and a Bonk tshirt is the look of your Nairobi?”
“It is Friday night, Potash,” he sounds agitated, “and you are talking too much gay shit while all I want to hear is ‘do me… do me… oga my broda…la la la la la la…’”
“Smack that, yani,” I laugh, “Shaking it like in the Akon video lakini you jua how that shit plays out when you do the horizontal.”
“I know what you mean,” he smiles, “and those are the weighty issues of men. If you must contemplate anything…” He pauses to stuff a wad of leaves into his mouth and bite a G.
“Is how,” I interrupt, “you are kulaing goks these days?”
“If you must contemplate anything, Potash,” he stares me in the eye, “it is the fate of some pussy with your name on it that is at this moment katikaing huko Molly’s.”
Half-lifing me the gaff, he says, “No guts, no morning glory! So will you be man enough, as Conrad says, to face the darkness? And that is all the difference between a thinking man and a doing man on a Nairobi night.” Then he started to walk off towards Qs.
“By the way,” he said turning around, “seeing that you have all this time to think…” He laughed and started walking back towards me. “Frankly, I can see how you can find the time, I mean, jerking off is what… one minute… like short time and then you are back to the cogitations in lieu of production; living out their existential angst- real and imagined- instead of writing that is your kind of artist?
This is Nairobi, not New Fuck.” He was, briefly interrupted by a lupa dawg, whoz happening and one armed hug from a street boy. “Fucking Westlands,” I say to myself, “Didn’t like Tupac die?”
“Listen Potash” N.M. said walking towards me and offering me a cigarette. “In the time it takes for you to smoke that cigarette,” he mocked, “why don’t you ponder over what your online avatar does on Friday nights. You know, when you are offline in that hovel of yours writing shit that don’t mean shit.
He is a Kenyan man, No? Mwanaume hufanya.”
“Wanawake,” The street boy, still hovering around, said and walked off after N.M.
Monday, March 22, 2010
#PoBo #5
Apropos tech is good but we also need to bring back Story, personally, I tend to remember the people rather than the graphs. Recently, the number of Kenyans on Facebook has been thrown at me like two hundred times. But the figure never exists beyond a Stick It on my mind saying: so what? Who are these people? What are they doing on Facebook? Is anyone using them for social or political organising… what? Is it all cute cats; causes and high school reunions, really?
The numbers never stay with me the way stories- the technology user’s social experience- do. One day my cousin told me that his wife had scrawled the phone numbers of all his clandies on their bed. That to me was mobile telephony penetration. Ages later Safcom hit one million subscribers and I was like: So?
What numbers don’t tell me, stories do.
Yesterday, I was sitting at my local veve base catching up on my daily dose of boy talk.
My taxi guy picking up girls on Facebook? The internet has finally come to Kenya. Actually, as far as Facebook goes I am no longer interested in the numbers just how the street has gone Funga 2.0.
I mean, he drives a taxi and I am the guy with the blog.
The numbers never stay with me the way stories- the technology user’s social experience- do. One day my cousin told me that his wife had scrawled the phone numbers of all his clandies on their bed. That to me was mobile telephony penetration. Ages later Safcom hit one million subscribers and I was like: So?
What numbers don’t tell me, stories do.
Yesterday, I was sitting at my local veve base catching up on my daily dose of boy talk.
“Weee,” Mwenda the miraa guy ulizaed Jamo wa taxi, “bwana ulichambua ile kitu ya Facebook?”
“Kwani?” Jamo chekaed. “Na imeshaanza kujileta kwangu ka hobby.”
“Facebook?” I asked, “yaani roundi hii Jamo unawakunywa na mtandao?”
My taxi guy picking up girls on Facebook? The internet has finally come to Kenya. Actually, as far as Facebook goes I am no longer interested in the numbers just how the street has gone Funga 2.0.
I mean, he drives a taxi and I am the guy with the blog.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
TECH KILLED THE KENYAN BLOG
Days I miss: when Kenyan blogs were about stories. The politics of every day- the Kenyan way of life relived by voices hitherto unknown- and not big politics.
In 2006 when I discovered Kenyan blogs, I stopped reading newspapers. I used to skim in fact rather than read newspapers because what Kibaki and Raila do is not news, how it affects me is. And newspapers didn’t tell me that. I cannot blame them, they weren’t addressing me… my demographic. Some blogs did.
As a blogger, a lot of my writing then was very political. Political in the sense of: how a certain kind of Kenyan responds to and copes with the consequences of bad governance. It wasn’t about the shenanigans of the political class but the ways in which some of us responded to them. When the political class made a cameo appearance in my blog it was because I, or one of my peers, had enjoyed their largesse. A largesse that faded into the new harems, bellies, Benzos and numbered accounts of a Kibaki era noveau riche class. In the Moi days, I liked to point out, they shared the love. You could walk into town and take a matatu home with a slice of Goldenberg money.
In Kenya most people are just trying to get by, trying not to shit where they eat and more often than not, failing. That is the story I told. Others told tall tales from their yuppie lives. I couldn’t relate, but the stories were so well told I read them anyway. Because they had place, and character. They were about a Kenya, but most important of all, they were not about News, they were about people. The internet lives and imaginations of certain Kenyans. The parochialism was not only charming, it put fluency and local colour into the blogs and for one moment a pastiche of an immensely stratified and arbitrary nation called Kenya was starting to emerge.
Not for long.
Outside our Kenyan web space it had became necessary, for some- almost always Westerners- to ‘showcase’ what was being hailed as Africa’s tech revolution. While localised web-rings had come into being much earlier and served as great go-to places for a non NGO or mainstream media mediated view of a given African country, they were quickly made irrelevant by a nascent but highly influential cabal of digitised African Consultants. A pan-African curation had emerged.
Unfortunately, it privileged tech. They defined what ‘Africa’s’ web space Is, Was and Will be: a place where the tech minority can say a lot about their innovations and very little about who they were making them for and why.
A bad situation, for the storytellers, turned horrible with the advent of Twitter. In the age of Twitter ‘our stories’ sound like this:
Why the fuck did you smoke weed? Where did you get it? Why the hell do I even need to know this? Constipated, stinky or both, a shit is just a shit and everyone takes one. The only reason I should know about yours is because it has more imagination than mine. #maafaka? Question: when it trends, what does it say about you- outside the internet- as an actor in time, space and social environments? That your life revolves around smoking weed, Twitter and Nigga
comedies?
But Twitter, is an easy drug to blame the death of storytelling on the Kenyan web space on. The death of Story came when Bloggers turned into professionals- Internet authorities. Suddenly the broadcaster and his equipment became more important than the broadcast.
By then, many of us had started clocking speaking engagements to talk about blogs and blogging. And we talked about Wordpress and Blogger and some even went ahead and registered their own domains. Those that did so assumed that the world would take them more seriously if they blogged on their own domains. Problem is, they remained all domains- Flash, Twitter and Facebook widgets- and no content. Who could find time to blog anymore while shuffling from ‘How to set up a blog’- Tech Aid, Kibera- to ‘The future of African blogs’- Afri Tech, New York?
Meanwhile, words buzzed into meaninglessness: Social media; cyber-activism; citizen journalism and Story died.
The pan-African curators or the African Internet’s power axis- chugging deux ex machina like in the background, all along- came to the fore and absorbed the Kenyan blogosphere into a broader African Internet narrative. A narrative, invariably, defined by the trope of Africa in crisis. A crisis ever defined by body counts and mitigated by a dash of solar power. In the spirit of pan-African technological innovation who cares that even the primordial swamp was solar powered? Why should the African bother with inventions while it can follow those who already have a wheel?
Pan-African curation brought, to some, money and Twitter fame but it took with it our choice in the stories we told. The blogger big times rolled in, yes, but they had ‘tech’ stamped all over them. Any blogger worth his salt either went into making tools and gadgets or into talking about them.
Tech for Africa became both media and content; all our internet lives became tech.
The ‘social media’ crowd made serious games; the ‘cyber-activists’ made and talked about web tools and gadgets and the ‘citizen journalists’- with the indolence and gravy-train-spotting of their mainstream media kin- followed the social media hacks and the cyberactivists around.
We were firmly in the digitised world, where fame is a workaday quality. And the African version was defined purely by ones ability to innovate web tools and gadgets. Just having a drink with the small crowd of toolmakers and Tweeting about it was enough, though. But online, where, who and what is hot changes every second, all that we can remember is not even faces but social media handles and avatars. So, what about the reason why those people or objects had earned their second of fame?
No one is really inventing anything; no one is talking about the tech-distance between their innovations and their purported end users. The hell, in this entire tech-speak, there is no analysis, there is no, ‘are these the innovations you need as a Kenyan writer on the web?’ We have gotten too busy realising the infrastructure of an imagined Africa Information and Communications Technology bubble we have forgotten the communication part. We have obliterated the social- the stories and their meanings - in Social Media.
Tech is good and I fully support and admire those who are doing it, but if anyone wants to know: As a storyteller, I struggle with writing; writing is not the way I learnt how to tell stories, so how does innovating Wordpress make my work easier?
In 2006 when I discovered Kenyan blogs, I stopped reading newspapers. I used to skim in fact rather than read newspapers because what Kibaki and Raila do is not news, how it affects me is. And newspapers didn’t tell me that. I cannot blame them, they weren’t addressing me… my demographic. Some blogs did.
As a blogger, a lot of my writing then was very political. Political in the sense of: how a certain kind of Kenyan responds to and copes with the consequences of bad governance. It wasn’t about the shenanigans of the political class but the ways in which some of us responded to them. When the political class made a cameo appearance in my blog it was because I, or one of my peers, had enjoyed their largesse. A largesse that faded into the new harems, bellies, Benzos and numbered accounts of a Kibaki era noveau riche class. In the Moi days, I liked to point out, they shared the love. You could walk into town and take a matatu home with a slice of Goldenberg money.
In Kenya most people are just trying to get by, trying not to shit where they eat and more often than not, failing. That is the story I told. Others told tall tales from their yuppie lives. I couldn’t relate, but the stories were so well told I read them anyway. Because they had place, and character. They were about a Kenya, but most important of all, they were not about News, they were about people. The internet lives and imaginations of certain Kenyans. The parochialism was not only charming, it put fluency and local colour into the blogs and for one moment a pastiche of an immensely stratified and arbitrary nation called Kenya was starting to emerge.
Not for long.
Outside our Kenyan web space it had became necessary, for some- almost always Westerners- to ‘showcase’ what was being hailed as Africa’s tech revolution. While localised web-rings had come into being much earlier and served as great go-to places for a non NGO or mainstream media mediated view of a given African country, they were quickly made irrelevant by a nascent but highly influential cabal of digitised African Consultants. A pan-African curation had emerged.
Unfortunately, it privileged tech. They defined what ‘Africa’s’ web space Is, Was and Will be: a place where the tech minority can say a lot about their innovations and very little about who they were making them for and why.
A bad situation, for the storytellers, turned horrible with the advent of Twitter. In the age of Twitter ‘our stories’ sound like this:
@X: I smoked weed today #maafaka
@Y: RT @X: I smoked weed today #maafaka
@Z: RTRT @X: I smoked weed today #maafaka
@A: Hihihi @X smoked weed today (via @Z) #maafaka
Why the fuck did you smoke weed? Where did you get it? Why the hell do I even need to know this? Constipated, stinky or both, a shit is just a shit and everyone takes one. The only reason I should know about yours is because it has more imagination than mine. #maafaka? Question: when it trends, what does it say about you- outside the internet- as an actor in time, space and social environments? That your life revolves around smoking weed, Twitter and Nigga
comedies?
But Twitter, is an easy drug to blame the death of storytelling on the Kenyan web space on. The death of Story came when Bloggers turned into professionals- Internet authorities. Suddenly the broadcaster and his equipment became more important than the broadcast.
By then, many of us had started clocking speaking engagements to talk about blogs and blogging. And we talked about Wordpress and Blogger and some even went ahead and registered their own domains. Those that did so assumed that the world would take them more seriously if they blogged on their own domains. Problem is, they remained all domains- Flash, Twitter and Facebook widgets- and no content. Who could find time to blog anymore while shuffling from ‘How to set up a blog’- Tech Aid, Kibera- to ‘The future of African blogs’- Afri Tech, New York?
Meanwhile, words buzzed into meaninglessness: Social media; cyber-activism; citizen journalism and Story died.
The pan-African curators or the African Internet’s power axis- chugging deux ex machina like in the background, all along- came to the fore and absorbed the Kenyan blogosphere into a broader African Internet narrative. A narrative, invariably, defined by the trope of Africa in crisis. A crisis ever defined by body counts and mitigated by a dash of solar power. In the spirit of pan-African technological innovation who cares that even the primordial swamp was solar powered? Why should the African bother with inventions while it can follow those who already have a wheel?
Pan-African curation brought, to some, money and Twitter fame but it took with it our choice in the stories we told. The blogger big times rolled in, yes, but they had ‘tech’ stamped all over them. Any blogger worth his salt either went into making tools and gadgets or into talking about them.
Tech for Africa became both media and content; all our internet lives became tech.
The ‘social media’ crowd made serious games; the ‘cyber-activists’ made and talked about web tools and gadgets and the ‘citizen journalists’- with the indolence and gravy-train-spotting of their mainstream media kin- followed the social media hacks and the cyberactivists around.
We were firmly in the digitised world, where fame is a workaday quality. And the African version was defined purely by ones ability to innovate web tools and gadgets. Just having a drink with the small crowd of toolmakers and Tweeting about it was enough, though. But online, where, who and what is hot changes every second, all that we can remember is not even faces but social media handles and avatars. So, what about the reason why those people or objects had earned their second of fame?
No one is really inventing anything; no one is talking about the tech-distance between their innovations and their purported end users. The hell, in this entire tech-speak, there is no analysis, there is no, ‘are these the innovations you need as a Kenyan writer on the web?’ We have gotten too busy realising the infrastructure of an imagined Africa Information and Communications Technology bubble we have forgotten the communication part. We have obliterated the social- the stories and their meanings - in Social Media.
Tech is good and I fully support and admire those who are doing it, but if anyone wants to know: As a storyteller, I struggle with writing; writing is not the way I learnt how to tell stories, so how does innovating Wordpress make my work easier?
Monday, March 15, 2010
#PoBo #4
IX. Do You Write (or Read)?
I wish I could say, yes, I write checks. Like P. Diddy. But me… me I am a cash guy. Hihihi… if I wrote you a cheque you best treat it with the same dharau you reserve for your M.P’s cheques. The big difference between that M.P and me, really, is that I am a businessman servicing a need while he is a make believe civil servant who robs the needy.
Honestly, who sleeps better, the guy that stole the poor man’s unga or the guy that sold some bangi? To a bunch of American exchange students for crying out loud. Yaani, to a bunch of mzungus who come here, get arse, get ghanja and get out. Go home and get therapy… N.M, in his Mongo-speak would say, ‘no Africans were harmed in Dinda’s ghanja plantation.
I am not a slave driver, that is the fucking muhindis…Me I am the good guy.
The other day Potash is saying ati I am like a Mombasa beach hotel, I do not like doing business with Africans, what the hell does he know about business. Who has got some ethics here but me? Me, I do not sell drugs to people who don’t have health insurance. How does that make me a bad guy?
Busia Gold is a fair trade product.
Let us save the rest of the bull for those who know nothing about being a business man out here in Africa. Business, I mean, not biashara biashara…kuhustle, kuuza nyanya marikiti.
As reading goes, I am not much of a reader but I can tell if it is a fifty or a hundred. If it looks like money but I cannot read the amount, then it must be Chinese… and I do not touch Chinese shit. Hell, I do not fucking do business with the bloody business. Someday I must tell you about how Kang’ethe got burnt on a Semenya deal. No, not that Semenya, Semenya is, you know, a dual SIM phone. Hihihi, it is kinda clever, really, wish I could say I coined it.
But anyway, I do not touch Chinese shit… I mean, angalia phone yangu, unaona kama imeandikwa fockya.
I went into biashara for the dough-lo…and the only schooling I needed in money I got.
Peddling on the streets of Nairobi doesn’t teach you shit. You are selling joints for twenty bob but all the money you worry about is the 30 grand the cops want from you after they planted a joint on you. What was left of the joint you had share with them, that is. Dadi, you are no better than the hawker who has to bribe the kanjo who just smashed her tomatoes.
Waafrika! It is not worth playing, really.
If you aren’t playing big then you must be playing niche otherwise you are not a businessman, you are jailbait. Niche was my kind of game. And niche if I can attribute it to one philosophy of the Potash Book Club, it is that it is better to be read by ten people who get you than by ten million who assume they do. At the book club they used to say that they write for Kenyans who seek the truth outside the Nation, what I say is that my product is for consumers who care to trace it from farm to fork, so to speak.
And as a niche player I rubbed holsters with the fat and the fabulous. Waah… I have seen a guy pay for pussy with a fake hundred dollar bill. And he wasn’t Naija, just acting like one. There I was thinking: stupid bitch, stick to the Karumaindos and the two socs that you are used to.
Me, I have been on the Highway, some chick shooting off my dingila and two Johnnies sitting at the back looking like Big Ben and his twin. Tucked away, at least for now, are their British Army issue pistols.
The Johnnies are driving a hard bargain on a stone of Busia Gold. They are acting like this is 1954 and it is their place to tell an African what to do including what to charge for his crop. They acting like mzungus after they have been in Kenya long enough to say ‘Tusker baridi.’ You know how they play: Oh, my cab guy can get me more than that for five hundred bob… sijui my colleague is with some NGO in Ethiopia and he is bringing me Shashamane. Well, you know what I say to that shit, ‘my stone is 20 large, that is why I am pushing a VX and not driving you around in a taxi.’
So I am saying to the Johnnies, ‘I am told the weed in Europe kicks arse something, but how good is it to you when you are planting landmines and chasing Samburu arse in Kenya?’
Between them Brit falas they have like five thousand Kenya Shillings. But they have British Pounds too. So I hit them and more- like twenty Kenya Shillings on every Pound.
Soon they are handing me Pounds and Shillings. And I have to count them, do the math and fold them. The Malaya wants me to smack her in the arse but I think it is silly and feel inclined to tell her to stop using me in her sales pitch to the bloody Johnnies. I want to tell her to get her mind back to Kenya where she lies on her back and I hit it- simple! I smack her arse, anyway, coz it feels good to do it with a fistful of money. Do it like a Jay Z no one has heard of yet.
Long of the short is that if you be playing on anaa level, you’ve got to know your money. Live it. Feel it.
Oh, and of course I never gave them Busia Gold. It must have been a sudden feeling of hatefulness, you know, suddenly thinking too much about what their ancestors had done to mine. So I passed them some pussy brand called Zion from Mt. Kenya where it is too cold and too wet for a good crop. But, really, British Army, Embassy Marines, Kenya Police… is all the same from my business end view. And I do not have an arsehole big enough to hold my shit and theirs.
Well, I know this was meant to be about reading and writing but then again they did tell me to write what I know. And the Business it is. As for lessons to take away, I always say that everyone always gets the lesson they choose to learn. But if I must impose one, it is: If you hear someone say it is never personal, just business, then they learnt their business skills from movies.
I wish I could say, yes, I write checks. Like P. Diddy. But me… me I am a cash guy. Hihihi… if I wrote you a cheque you best treat it with the same dharau you reserve for your M.P’s cheques. The big difference between that M.P and me, really, is that I am a businessman servicing a need while he is a make believe civil servant who robs the needy.
Honestly, who sleeps better, the guy that stole the poor man’s unga or the guy that sold some bangi? To a bunch of American exchange students for crying out loud. Yaani, to a bunch of mzungus who come here, get arse, get ghanja and get out. Go home and get therapy… N.M, in his Mongo-speak would say, ‘no Africans were harmed in Dinda’s ghanja plantation.
I am not a slave driver, that is the fucking muhindis…Me I am the good guy.
The other day Potash is saying ati I am like a Mombasa beach hotel, I do not like doing business with Africans, what the hell does he know about business. Who has got some ethics here but me? Me, I do not sell drugs to people who don’t have health insurance. How does that make me a bad guy?
Busia Gold is a fair trade product.
Let us save the rest of the bull for those who know nothing about being a business man out here in Africa. Business, I mean, not biashara biashara…kuhustle, kuuza nyanya marikiti.
As reading goes, I am not much of a reader but I can tell if it is a fifty or a hundred. If it looks like money but I cannot read the amount, then it must be Chinese… and I do not touch Chinese shit. Hell, I do not fucking do business with the bloody business. Someday I must tell you about how Kang’ethe got burnt on a Semenya deal. No, not that Semenya, Semenya is, you know, a dual SIM phone. Hihihi, it is kinda clever, really, wish I could say I coined it.
But anyway, I do not touch Chinese shit… I mean, angalia phone yangu, unaona kama imeandikwa fockya.
I went into biashara for the dough-lo…and the only schooling I needed in money I got.
Peddling on the streets of Nairobi doesn’t teach you shit. You are selling joints for twenty bob but all the money you worry about is the 30 grand the cops want from you after they planted a joint on you. What was left of the joint you had share with them, that is. Dadi, you are no better than the hawker who has to bribe the kanjo who just smashed her tomatoes.
Waafrika! It is not worth playing, really.
If you aren’t playing big then you must be playing niche otherwise you are not a businessman, you are jailbait. Niche was my kind of game. And niche if I can attribute it to one philosophy of the Potash Book Club, it is that it is better to be read by ten people who get you than by ten million who assume they do. At the book club they used to say that they write for Kenyans who seek the truth outside the Nation, what I say is that my product is for consumers who care to trace it from farm to fork, so to speak.
And as a niche player I rubbed holsters with the fat and the fabulous. Waah… I have seen a guy pay for pussy with a fake hundred dollar bill. And he wasn’t Naija, just acting like one. There I was thinking: stupid bitch, stick to the Karumaindos and the two socs that you are used to.
Me, I have been on the Highway, some chick shooting off my dingila and two Johnnies sitting at the back looking like Big Ben and his twin. Tucked away, at least for now, are their British Army issue pistols.
The Johnnies are driving a hard bargain on a stone of Busia Gold. They are acting like this is 1954 and it is their place to tell an African what to do including what to charge for his crop. They acting like mzungus after they have been in Kenya long enough to say ‘Tusker baridi.’ You know how they play: Oh, my cab guy can get me more than that for five hundred bob… sijui my colleague is with some NGO in Ethiopia and he is bringing me Shashamane. Well, you know what I say to that shit, ‘my stone is 20 large, that is why I am pushing a VX and not driving you around in a taxi.’
So I am saying to the Johnnies, ‘I am told the weed in Europe kicks arse something, but how good is it to you when you are planting landmines and chasing Samburu arse in Kenya?’
Between them Brit falas they have like five thousand Kenya Shillings. But they have British Pounds too. So I hit them and more- like twenty Kenya Shillings on every Pound.
Soon they are handing me Pounds and Shillings. And I have to count them, do the math and fold them. The Malaya wants me to smack her in the arse but I think it is silly and feel inclined to tell her to stop using me in her sales pitch to the bloody Johnnies. I want to tell her to get her mind back to Kenya where she lies on her back and I hit it- simple! I smack her arse, anyway, coz it feels good to do it with a fistful of money. Do it like a Jay Z no one has heard of yet.
Long of the short is that if you be playing on anaa level, you’ve got to know your money. Live it. Feel it.
Oh, and of course I never gave them Busia Gold. It must have been a sudden feeling of hatefulness, you know, suddenly thinking too much about what their ancestors had done to mine. So I passed them some pussy brand called Zion from Mt. Kenya where it is too cold and too wet for a good crop. But, really, British Army, Embassy Marines, Kenya Police… is all the same from my business end view. And I do not have an arsehole big enough to hold my shit and theirs.
Well, I know this was meant to be about reading and writing but then again they did tell me to write what I know. And the Business it is. As for lessons to take away, I always say that everyone always gets the lesson they choose to learn. But if I must impose one, it is: If you hear someone say it is never personal, just business, then they learnt their business skills from movies.
Monday, March 01, 2010
#PoBo #3
VIII. Shakespeare or the Bible?
Ati, what’s that got to do with anything…? Or do you mean to ask which one I penda, eh?
Skia, a guy… Just because I know some wannabe writers doesn’t maanisha ati I read them or anything else for that matter. Me, I read money…kwisha! I am a businessman… it is all I wanted to be when I grew up. And I am all grown now… and I am not saying that those boyz haven’t grown up yet, they just grew up into something I don’t jua.
I mean, how do you grow up with your boys, dinya the same chicks, half-life anything that matters with them and skive all the same classes… then you wake up one day and the guys are writing stuff that makes you go, ati what? Thing that puzzles me most is vile they are seaming: this is what it is like in our mtaa. But the only thing I recognise in those stories is the nouns.
Really, who are these guys, trying to tell more stories than my grandmother? And it is fine if that is what they want to do but why can’t they just tell stories like the rest of us. Yaani, anaa time I am in the old neighbourhood and I have brought 18 litres of muratina and you know these situations, people thank you for your largesse by giving you an audience. It is the same thing politicians do at funerals, yaani, if a guy writes you a cheque for five thousand bob, you have to sit and listen to his crap. So I am in the middle of a storo big time. See, I am right there speaking like a mtaa boy telling them about the hustle- cops sumbuaing, mafala kuangushwa- and you know what N.M says? “Dinda, man, conjugate?” I didn’t know what conjugate meant back then, but now that I do… conjugate sheng? Who the fuck is this guy, really?
If I am allowed to think, I can say that this writing thing is all good fun, when you are nineteen sipping on Napshizzle in the mtaa, but bro… by the time we are hitting 25 and I am living in one of those, so called leafy suburbs and Timi and P still don’t have a hustle… something is wrong. I mean, it is one thing to not believe in money but it is something else trying to at least try and afford your own fucking booze, you know.
So I am the guy that everyone is flashing because Timi’s sister needs school fees; the Stone Zone is grumpy from alcohol withdrawal; Jose has been arrested again and the OCS is on the case so we are looking at 10Gs, minimum, for the bribe and... Bobo needs another abortion.
It is the reason why us Africans cannot endelea…I mean, I haven’t shagged Bobo since she grew breasts but it is money out of my pocket when everyone else does.
But then again these are my people. It might keep a man like me, a man with ambition, down, but then a man like me cannot exist without a people like them. I am talking about community, belonging… and I cannot speak for Niggers in bloody Congo or Namibia, but what I know of Africa- Sekta III- down there they have a God who they call community. And I love my Sekta III people like ‘Bumpy’ loved his Harlem people. Because there was a time I was a ten-bob-a-joint peddler and yet they all loved me like a brother.
People had my back when I didn’t have shit and I was working choo namba nane. Insane times those, my friend, when I considered it a good day if I had sold nothing but got away with my life. Lived, as we used to say, to die another day. And you know, the boys would come down and shoot the breeze, write Kanjo Mavi on the wall… you know, just be around which a lot of times meant that some big, ugly street kid would not try to stick his mangy prick up my arse that day.
So, on the one hand I cannot bitch but on the other hand I have to hate the guy that invented Mpesa. It made it easier to give but it took away the speeches that go with it… the community. You know, long before Mpesa, when we would hit both an ATM and the nearest wines and spirits and then head out to meet our people, N.M used to say that, to Sekta III, I was like a visiting professor. I didn’t get it. But P put it better: “Dinda, you are the proud alumnus of Mtaa Senior School, who went out there and beat the system and are now returned laden not only with spoils but insider knowledge too. Tunakuinamishia…!”
Anyway, all I am saying is that a man’s money leaves him through many doors, question is: will people come to your funeral because you were a true Negro or will they come because someone has to dig the grave, anyway?
And what I say of me, Me I am a decent African man, the children I know off, I pay for, those that I do not, I pray for.
Ati, what’s that got to do with anything…? Or do you mean to ask which one I penda, eh?
Skia, a guy… Just because I know some wannabe writers doesn’t maanisha ati I read them or anything else for that matter. Me, I read money…kwisha! I am a businessman… it is all I wanted to be when I grew up. And I am all grown now… and I am not saying that those boyz haven’t grown up yet, they just grew up into something I don’t jua.
I mean, how do you grow up with your boys, dinya the same chicks, half-life anything that matters with them and skive all the same classes… then you wake up one day and the guys are writing stuff that makes you go, ati what? Thing that puzzles me most is vile they are seaming: this is what it is like in our mtaa. But the only thing I recognise in those stories is the nouns.
Really, who are these guys, trying to tell more stories than my grandmother? And it is fine if that is what they want to do but why can’t they just tell stories like the rest of us. Yaani, anaa time I am in the old neighbourhood and I have brought 18 litres of muratina and you know these situations, people thank you for your largesse by giving you an audience. It is the same thing politicians do at funerals, yaani, if a guy writes you a cheque for five thousand bob, you have to sit and listen to his crap. So I am in the middle of a storo big time. See, I am right there speaking like a mtaa boy telling them about the hustle- cops sumbuaing, mafala kuangushwa- and you know what N.M says? “Dinda, man, conjugate?” I didn’t know what conjugate meant back then, but now that I do… conjugate sheng? Who the fuck is this guy, really?
If I am allowed to think, I can say that this writing thing is all good fun, when you are nineteen sipping on Napshizzle in the mtaa, but bro… by the time we are hitting 25 and I am living in one of those, so called leafy suburbs and Timi and P still don’t have a hustle… something is wrong. I mean, it is one thing to not believe in money but it is something else trying to at least try and afford your own fucking booze, you know.
So I am the guy that everyone is flashing because Timi’s sister needs school fees; the Stone Zone is grumpy from alcohol withdrawal; Jose has been arrested again and the OCS is on the case so we are looking at 10Gs, minimum, for the bribe and... Bobo needs another abortion.
It is the reason why us Africans cannot endelea…I mean, I haven’t shagged Bobo since she grew breasts but it is money out of my pocket when everyone else does.
But then again these are my people. It might keep a man like me, a man with ambition, down, but then a man like me cannot exist without a people like them. I am talking about community, belonging… and I cannot speak for Niggers in bloody Congo or Namibia, but what I know of Africa- Sekta III- down there they have a God who they call community. And I love my Sekta III people like ‘Bumpy’ loved his Harlem people. Because there was a time I was a ten-bob-a-joint peddler and yet they all loved me like a brother.
People had my back when I didn’t have shit and I was working choo namba nane. Insane times those, my friend, when I considered it a good day if I had sold nothing but got away with my life. Lived, as we used to say, to die another day. And you know, the boys would come down and shoot the breeze, write Kanjo Mavi on the wall… you know, just be around which a lot of times meant that some big, ugly street kid would not try to stick his mangy prick up my arse that day.
So, on the one hand I cannot bitch but on the other hand I have to hate the guy that invented Mpesa. It made it easier to give but it took away the speeches that go with it… the community. You know, long before Mpesa, when we would hit both an ATM and the nearest wines and spirits and then head out to meet our people, N.M used to say that, to Sekta III, I was like a visiting professor. I didn’t get it. But P put it better: “Dinda, you are the proud alumnus of Mtaa Senior School, who went out there and beat the system and are now returned laden not only with spoils but insider knowledge too. Tunakuinamishia…!”
Anyway, all I am saying is that a man’s money leaves him through many doors, question is: will people come to your funeral because you were a true Negro or will they come because someone has to dig the grave, anyway?
And what I say of me, Me I am a decent African man, the children I know off, I pay for, those that I do not, I pray for.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
THE POLITICAL TRAGEDY OF OUR KENYAN TIMES
Once again this blog is being taken over by a guest post from N.M
There comes a time, in the history of a nation, when all its citizens are staring the devil in the eye. A time when only two extremes remain: the evil and the lesser evil. That moment when the majority is us and the minority is them. A moment, so widely imagined by the individual citizens it sounds cliché: The moment of truth.
As I write this, Kenya is having its moment. But who knows- a day being worth its weight in stuffed ballots- by the time this is read that moment will be long lost. Mummified into rheumy excrements of disillusioned chang’aa den intellectuals with radical tendencies.
Quick recap: First President of Kenya, Kenyatta is doing this. Second President Moi is doing that and keeping Kenyatta’s boys down. Oginga Odinga, perpetual oppositionist says out with Kenyatta today and out with Moi the next day. Moi says in with Odinga (Oginga’s son). But Odinga, quite a chip off the old block that one, says out with Moi: Kibaki Tosha!
Now Kibaki, has over all these years, never said in with this one or out with that one. He has, somehow managed to stay, in with this one, in with that one or in with no one, ‘but if it comes with benefits then you can call me Chief of the Opposition.’ When Odinga calls him to glory, Kibaki, seems to falter. He appears to have absolutely no idea what to do with real power. But that begs the question: did Kibaki even want to be President? Was all Kibaki wanted to reap the benefits of our political system without ever being an economic victim of it? Or did he merely spend all his life ensuring a future for his grandchildren that would lack nothing.
Whatever Kibaki’s aims have been all these years, he is now president. Everything he does, now affects millions. And Kibaki does no wrong. In fact Kibaki does nothing in a country that knows when the President has lunch. With details, and that he liked it and gave the waitress a large sum of money. The president as benefactor; grand old African man who receives delegations of women leaders on one day and names a street in a far away town that hasn’t been built yet after his third wife. Kibaki would have none of that in a country where people had only known of The President and never of the Presidency.
Kibaki, startled out of the fence he had been sitting on, seemed to have missed the manual: The Kenyan President’s first duty is to entertain the masses. To be a friendly despot who eats ugali with you one minute and you, with who knows. Kibaki appeared to stand above politics in a country where everything was held together by politics. Quickly the country, economic boom, smooth roads and all, slipped into anarchy. It took bloodshed and gun-boat diplomats to restore us to the political rhythm of our fabled island of peace.
Ironically, the deal that was struck to win our peace is also the tragedy of our times. It is an interesting time in our history when the leaders of past governments and the opposers of them all are in the same government. Thugs not of any shade of Luo, Kamba, Kalenjin, Gikuyu or whatever but- thugs! Thugs!- as we say. Incorrigible thugs whose self-interest goes beyond any that caveman society can find acceptable, but that we, who accept them as leaders of our tribes, seem to approve of.
Somewhat that deal achieved the political equilibrium best suiting the dynasts. They proceeded to align themselves into PNU for the Kenyattas and ODM for the Odingas. The Moi’s place at the table faced a crisis worse than Gideon’s political immaturity- a pretender to the throne, William Ruto. Daniel Moi had to stay on to raise his own tribe. If he founds it, it will not be called Jogoo. All this time, the mwananchi describes himself as Man U, Arsenal or poor.
It is a free for all at the top until Odinga forgets that the government is him and the immediate beneficiaries of Ambassadorships. It is him and the Kenyattas, Mois and Kibakis that he and his father once fought. Odinga joins his ODM tribesmen in attacking the Mois, the Kenyattas and the Kibakis.
All we are hearing now is Kenyatta na Passat; Odinga na mahindi; Moi na Mau. In the meantime Kibaki lurks in the background with a paw, if only placed there by inaction, in every one of those bowls. Mwananchi na njaa!
There comes a time, in the history of a nation, when all its citizens are staring the devil in the eye. A time when only two extremes remain: the evil and the lesser evil. That moment when the majority is us and the minority is them. A moment, so widely imagined by the individual citizens it sounds cliché: The moment of truth.
As I write this, Kenya is having its moment. But who knows- a day being worth its weight in stuffed ballots- by the time this is read that moment will be long lost. Mummified into rheumy excrements of disillusioned chang’aa den intellectuals with radical tendencies.
Quick recap: First President of Kenya, Kenyatta is doing this. Second President Moi is doing that and keeping Kenyatta’s boys down. Oginga Odinga, perpetual oppositionist says out with Kenyatta today and out with Moi the next day. Moi says in with Odinga (Oginga’s son). But Odinga, quite a chip off the old block that one, says out with Moi: Kibaki Tosha!
Now Kibaki, has over all these years, never said in with this one or out with that one. He has, somehow managed to stay, in with this one, in with that one or in with no one, ‘but if it comes with benefits then you can call me Chief of the Opposition.’ When Odinga calls him to glory, Kibaki, seems to falter. He appears to have absolutely no idea what to do with real power. But that begs the question: did Kibaki even want to be President? Was all Kibaki wanted to reap the benefits of our political system without ever being an economic victim of it? Or did he merely spend all his life ensuring a future for his grandchildren that would lack nothing.
Whatever Kibaki’s aims have been all these years, he is now president. Everything he does, now affects millions. And Kibaki does no wrong. In fact Kibaki does nothing in a country that knows when the President has lunch. With details, and that he liked it and gave the waitress a large sum of money. The president as benefactor; grand old African man who receives delegations of women leaders on one day and names a street in a far away town that hasn’t been built yet after his third wife. Kibaki would have none of that in a country where people had only known of The President and never of the Presidency.
Kibaki, startled out of the fence he had been sitting on, seemed to have missed the manual: The Kenyan President’s first duty is to entertain the masses. To be a friendly despot who eats ugali with you one minute and you, with who knows. Kibaki appeared to stand above politics in a country where everything was held together by politics. Quickly the country, economic boom, smooth roads and all, slipped into anarchy. It took bloodshed and gun-boat diplomats to restore us to the political rhythm of our fabled island of peace.
Ironically, the deal that was struck to win our peace is also the tragedy of our times. It is an interesting time in our history when the leaders of past governments and the opposers of them all are in the same government. Thugs not of any shade of Luo, Kamba, Kalenjin, Gikuyu or whatever but- thugs! Thugs!- as we say. Incorrigible thugs whose self-interest goes beyond any that caveman society can find acceptable, but that we, who accept them as leaders of our tribes, seem to approve of.
Somewhat that deal achieved the political equilibrium best suiting the dynasts. They proceeded to align themselves into PNU for the Kenyattas and ODM for the Odingas. The Moi’s place at the table faced a crisis worse than Gideon’s political immaturity- a pretender to the throne, William Ruto. Daniel Moi had to stay on to raise his own tribe. If he founds it, it will not be called Jogoo. All this time, the mwananchi describes himself as Man U, Arsenal or poor.
It is a free for all at the top until Odinga forgets that the government is him and the immediate beneficiaries of Ambassadorships. It is him and the Kenyattas, Mois and Kibakis that he and his father once fought. Odinga joins his ODM tribesmen in attacking the Mois, the Kenyattas and the Kibakis.
All we are hearing now is Kenyatta na Passat; Odinga na mahindi; Moi na Mau. In the meantime Kibaki lurks in the background with a paw, if only placed there by inaction, in every one of those bowls. Mwananchi na njaa!
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
#PoBo #2
V. Old Bill says we are mere actors.
True. But he never says we cannot be writers and directors too
VI. It is meaningful to seek…
The artist’s primary duties are to his art and his politics. To find that equilibrium point where the politics don’t get in the way of the story and vice versa is what I consider most meaningful to seek. There are no Big-Bang moments when stories come into existence- they simmer through our everyday experiences. And because our everyday is, broadly speaking, inherently political then how can the artist ditch the political? You can spend all your ‘apolitical’ life carving zebras by day and as a dancing Maasai by night but bottom line is there is a political discourse- someone else idea of ‘art’- that not only underpays you but also orders your life. For me the difference between a Kitschden and a creative studio is the ability of one to feed off the politics while subverting it. One carves better and better giraffes while the other still carves giraffes but ones with albinism; with diamonds (that no one in Africa has ever seen) on the soles of their feet. …I don’t know, the dancing Maasai who fucks the mzungu and writes the book.
VII. The White Girl and the Savage?
Dude, that book doesn’t exist. Well, there were some 15,000 words or so. A focus group… and, uhm… auditions. Yeah, no white girls were harmed in the making of this film. I mean, of course that is the kind of thing I would say if I ever wrote such a film. But, frankly, with the text you imagine connections. What if somewhat the Savage never, really, wins? Is there a poetic justice ring to that ‘no white girls were harmed’ for the Hip Hop scholar meaning to compare your angst to that of Tupac? When it is all filtered through the discourses of Africa and development what are you: a poster boy for safe sex or yet another way to ‘other’ black masculinity? In the end, there could be something in there, digitally archived on the net that reveals the antagonism of our time. One jaundiced and probably ignorant view but a view expressed, nevertheless. …and somewhat, for me, that is the beauty of the internet.
Oh, but in the long run… long before he is dead, the artist is getting paid. He is after all still painting giraffes by day and working as a dancing Maasai by night. He remembers the face-off between Mahina and Patterson, in The Ghost and the Darkness, as one of the most poignant and political moments in Hollywood’s Africa. The last outing for a kind of African who power and its whitewash over history, rubbed off the face of the earth with a derisive noble savage. It is a scene after, Colonel Patterson, being in African for only a day and having never seen a lion before kills a lion with one shot and brings order to the place of killing that is Tsavo.
“You know, I also have killed a lion,” Mahina tells Patterson, recently Christened One Shot, “I used my hands.” Later on Mahina is killed by a lion. But Patterson kills all the lions are builds the bridge to the British exploitation of the East African mainland.
The lions are now at the Field Museum in Chicago, Colonel Patterson is celebrated in film and literature and the kind of African that declared him One shot, tamer of the African wild rules in place of the Brits. Mahina’s spirit, one hopes, still lives and though it carves giraffes to eke out a living, in the evening- before the wardrobe change into a dancing Maasai- he takes a little time off to carve gay giraffes.
VII. Who is the Ghost and who is the Darkness?
Don’t know… there are all Africa types in that film, mercenaries, collaborators, fools, conquistadors {…}
True. But he never says we cannot be writers and directors too
VI. It is meaningful to seek…
The artist’s primary duties are to his art and his politics. To find that equilibrium point where the politics don’t get in the way of the story and vice versa is what I consider most meaningful to seek. There are no Big-Bang moments when stories come into existence- they simmer through our everyday experiences. And because our everyday is, broadly speaking, inherently political then how can the artist ditch the political? You can spend all your ‘apolitical’ life carving zebras by day and as a dancing Maasai by night but bottom line is there is a political discourse- someone else idea of ‘art’- that not only underpays you but also orders your life. For me the difference between a Kitschden and a creative studio is the ability of one to feed off the politics while subverting it. One carves better and better giraffes while the other still carves giraffes but ones with albinism; with diamonds (that no one in Africa has ever seen) on the soles of their feet. …I don’t know, the dancing Maasai who fucks the mzungu and writes the book.
VII. The White Girl and the Savage?
Dude, that book doesn’t exist. Well, there were some 15,000 words or so. A focus group… and, uhm… auditions. Yeah, no white girls were harmed in the making of this film. I mean, of course that is the kind of thing I would say if I ever wrote such a film. But, frankly, with the text you imagine connections. What if somewhat the Savage never, really, wins? Is there a poetic justice ring to that ‘no white girls were harmed’ for the Hip Hop scholar meaning to compare your angst to that of Tupac? When it is all filtered through the discourses of Africa and development what are you: a poster boy for safe sex or yet another way to ‘other’ black masculinity? In the end, there could be something in there, digitally archived on the net that reveals the antagonism of our time. One jaundiced and probably ignorant view but a view expressed, nevertheless. …and somewhat, for me, that is the beauty of the internet.
Oh, but in the long run… long before he is dead, the artist is getting paid. He is after all still painting giraffes by day and working as a dancing Maasai by night. He remembers the face-off between Mahina and Patterson, in The Ghost and the Darkness, as one of the most poignant and political moments in Hollywood’s Africa. The last outing for a kind of African who power and its whitewash over history, rubbed off the face of the earth with a derisive noble savage. It is a scene after, Colonel Patterson, being in African for only a day and having never seen a lion before kills a lion with one shot and brings order to the place of killing that is Tsavo.
“You know, I also have killed a lion,” Mahina tells Patterson, recently Christened One Shot, “I used my hands.” Later on Mahina is killed by a lion. But Patterson kills all the lions are builds the bridge to the British exploitation of the East African mainland.
The lions are now at the Field Museum in Chicago, Colonel Patterson is celebrated in film and literature and the kind of African that declared him One shot, tamer of the African wild rules in place of the Brits. Mahina’s spirit, one hopes, still lives and though it carves giraffes to eke out a living, in the evening- before the wardrobe change into a dancing Maasai- he takes a little time off to carve gay giraffes.
VII. Who is the Ghost and who is the Darkness?
Don’t know… there are all Africa types in that film, mercenaries, collaborators, fools, conquistadors {…}
Monday, February 15, 2010
#PoBo #1
I. Internet killed the toilet cubicle star…
{passage redacted}
II. I spent Valentine’s Day with two of my exes: pen and paper.
We agreed to spend a lot more time ménage a trois.
III. We were rebels, raiders of tombs that prison lost revolts…
{passage redacted}
IV. Not fighting souls but book adventurers. Knight Commanders of Idea.
Timi loved travel writing. Too bad he never read much of it. I always loved travel writing. But I never read much of it neither. Books weren’t there, not in the way they are, in my life now… I mean, I have picked up a decent library, now, been able to fill my space with books. Well, it is a minute space but for what, 30 books? That is the fucking University of Alexandria where I am coming from.
Coming soon: #PoBo.
{passage redacted}
II. I spent Valentine’s Day with two of my exes: pen and paper.
We agreed to spend a lot more time ménage a trois.
III. We were rebels, raiders of tombs that prison lost revolts…
{passage redacted}
IV. Not fighting souls but book adventurers. Knight Commanders of Idea.
Timi loved travel writing. Too bad he never read much of it. I always loved travel writing. But I never read much of it neither. Books weren’t there, not in the way they are, in my life now… I mean, I have picked up a decent library, now, been able to fill my space with books. Well, it is a minute space but for what, 30 books? That is the fucking University of Alexandria where I am coming from.
Coming soon: #PoBo.
Monday, January 25, 2010
You Win. Now. Play Again
Some freedom fighters are more equal than others
Some terrorists get to bury their dead
What about the soldiers?
What about the ones that get dragged into the forest;
headshots; cops taking scalps;
Soulless bodies disintegrating- like video game avatars?
Those ones don’t grin at Game Over!
Some freedom fighters are more equal than others
Some terrorists get to bury their dead
They prostate themselves with the muslims
They genuflect with the Chrisitians
They ride in the limos of politicians:
“The war is over now, cake is ours to keep”
But what about the bushrats facing bombs?
Some freedom fighters are more equal than others
Some terrorists get to bury their dead
Do you remember Jommo Kenyatta?
Do you remember Dedan Kimathi?
One got his prison, one got his freedom:
“We accept their Gods: money; power. The war is over now”
But can the unburied soldier ever be dead?
Some freedom fighters are more equal than others
Some terrorists get to bury their dead
You win. “Now”. Play again
Some terrorists get to bury their dead
What about the soldiers?
What about the ones that get dragged into the forest;
headshots; cops taking scalps;
Soulless bodies disintegrating- like video game avatars?
Those ones don’t grin at Game Over!
Some freedom fighters are more equal than others
Some terrorists get to bury their dead
They prostate themselves with the muslims
They genuflect with the Chrisitians
They ride in the limos of politicians:
“The war is over now, cake is ours to keep”
But what about the bushrats facing bombs?
Some freedom fighters are more equal than others
Some terrorists get to bury their dead
Do you remember Jommo Kenyatta?
Do you remember Dedan Kimathi?
One got his prison, one got his freedom:
“We accept their Gods: money; power. The war is over now”
But can the unburied soldier ever be dead?
Some freedom fighters are more equal than others
Some terrorists get to bury their dead
You win. “Now”. Play again
Monday, January 18, 2010
Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal: A Letter to Kenyan Muslims
Dear fellow citizens,
On Friday last, a section of you took to the streets of Nairobi to protest against the deportation of a fellow Muslim, the Jamaican born cleric Abdullah al-Faisal. The Kenyan media, which many of you have accused of fuelling Islamophobia and I am with you on that one, informs me that six police men were wounded in that protest. One of them has since succumbed to his injuries. That policeman was shot, isn’t that strange?
As I write this, Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal is being held at the Industrial Area Prison in Nairobi. The government’s plans to deport him seem to have been thwarted by fact that he is on, that bane of many other Muslims, an international no fly list. When the government attempted to send him to the Gambia, the Nigerians refused to grant him a transit visa. I mean, it is nothing personal what the Nigerians did, seeing how one of theirs- Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab- (who happens to be a Muslim and on a similar list) embarrassed them last Christmas. Just about the time Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal entered Kenya through the Lunga Lunga border with Tanzania.
But who is this sheikh really? The Brits say that he is a convicted criminal. He was arrested, charged with incitement to murder and stirring hatred, found guilty and sentenced to nine years in prison. After the first half of his prison term was over, he became eligible for parole at which point the British released him, deported him to Jamaica and banned him from the UK for life.
I do believe that a conviction doesn’t always make one a criminal: bad laws do exist. On the other hand, public opinion rarely brooks reason and so the general perception remains that the sheikh is a ‘criminal’. And, in the interest of the public, foreign ‘criminals’ are arrested and, hopefully, deported.
The arrest itself is telling. Crooked as Kenyan cops are, and granted that the antiterrorism unit that apprehended him is for all intents and purposes a lackey of American imperialism, they were very decent in the process of making the arrest. They said they had nothing on him, he was not being arrested for alleged terrorism activities or connections but because there was a deportation order out on him. They didn’t waterboard him and demand Osama Bin Laden’s cell phone number, they just asked to see his travel documents.
Whatever the Kenyan government had on him, it doesn’t help his case any better that he has two passports with different names. I am made to understand that he converted to Islam when he was sixteen and studied the religion in the Middle East. The question I keep asking myself is, if the passport that says he is Trevor William Forest, is Jamaican- and it should be- was it issued before he was sixteen and a Muslim? But if so, and assuming the guy is 45, hasn’t that passport been renewed, at least once? That is to say that he has knowingly, and with an intention to conceal his identity implied, been carrying two passports with different names. I will not even talk about dishonesty here, but international law demands that this person be arrested and charged. I will not even ask what the nationality on his other passport is because I have already seen someone who needs to be denied entry into any country that considers itself a respectable citizen of the world. No law, no precept in international justice can be used in his defence.
Was he profiled because he was a Muslim? Not really, as the immigration minister, Otieno Kajwang, said: we are targeting him because he has a history of criminality and we just do not want him in this country. (What Alfred Mutua has to say, as always, doesn't count).
Was his deportation legal? No it wasn’t, because it doesn’t seem as though he was given a chance to speak to his lawyer. Or at least a chance to challenge the deportation in a court of law which is what should be allowed him now. In another world, the immigration minister should have resigned for his part in the entire debacle, but that is just too much to ask. In the meantime, before any Muslim goes running on the street yelling: Oh, Islam this, Oh, Islam that, let him first explain to those Kenyans who do not seem to get it what a guy travelling with two passports with two different names has got to do with Islam. Before we find another reason to hate each other, let it be clear that just because one guy, who happens to be a Muslim is apprehended, does not mean that Islam has been apprehended. And if Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal goes on trial, the only people who will put Islam on trial will be his supporters, not the government of Kenya.
On Friday last, a section of you took to the streets of Nairobi to protest against the deportation of a fellow Muslim, the Jamaican born cleric Abdullah al-Faisal. The Kenyan media, which many of you have accused of fuelling Islamophobia and I am with you on that one, informs me that six police men were wounded in that protest. One of them has since succumbed to his injuries. That policeman was shot, isn’t that strange?
As I write this, Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal is being held at the Industrial Area Prison in Nairobi. The government’s plans to deport him seem to have been thwarted by fact that he is on, that bane of many other Muslims, an international no fly list. When the government attempted to send him to the Gambia, the Nigerians refused to grant him a transit visa. I mean, it is nothing personal what the Nigerians did, seeing how one of theirs- Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab- (who happens to be a Muslim and on a similar list) embarrassed them last Christmas. Just about the time Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal entered Kenya through the Lunga Lunga border with Tanzania.
But who is this sheikh really? The Brits say that he is a convicted criminal. He was arrested, charged with incitement to murder and stirring hatred, found guilty and sentenced to nine years in prison. After the first half of his prison term was over, he became eligible for parole at which point the British released him, deported him to Jamaica and banned him from the UK for life.
I do believe that a conviction doesn’t always make one a criminal: bad laws do exist. On the other hand, public opinion rarely brooks reason and so the general perception remains that the sheikh is a ‘criminal’. And, in the interest of the public, foreign ‘criminals’ are arrested and, hopefully, deported.
The arrest itself is telling. Crooked as Kenyan cops are, and granted that the antiterrorism unit that apprehended him is for all intents and purposes a lackey of American imperialism, they were very decent in the process of making the arrest. They said they had nothing on him, he was not being arrested for alleged terrorism activities or connections but because there was a deportation order out on him. They didn’t waterboard him and demand Osama Bin Laden’s cell phone number, they just asked to see his travel documents.
Whatever the Kenyan government had on him, it doesn’t help his case any better that he has two passports with different names. I am made to understand that he converted to Islam when he was sixteen and studied the religion in the Middle East. The question I keep asking myself is, if the passport that says he is Trevor William Forest, is Jamaican- and it should be- was it issued before he was sixteen and a Muslim? But if so, and assuming the guy is 45, hasn’t that passport been renewed, at least once? That is to say that he has knowingly, and with an intention to conceal his identity implied, been carrying two passports with different names. I will not even talk about dishonesty here, but international law demands that this person be arrested and charged. I will not even ask what the nationality on his other passport is because I have already seen someone who needs to be denied entry into any country that considers itself a respectable citizen of the world. No law, no precept in international justice can be used in his defence.
Was he profiled because he was a Muslim? Not really, as the immigration minister, Otieno Kajwang, said: we are targeting him because he has a history of criminality and we just do not want him in this country. (What Alfred Mutua has to say, as always, doesn't count).
Was his deportation legal? No it wasn’t, because it doesn’t seem as though he was given a chance to speak to his lawyer. Or at least a chance to challenge the deportation in a court of law which is what should be allowed him now. In another world, the immigration minister should have resigned for his part in the entire debacle, but that is just too much to ask. In the meantime, before any Muslim goes running on the street yelling: Oh, Islam this, Oh, Islam that, let him first explain to those Kenyans who do not seem to get it what a guy travelling with two passports with two different names has got to do with Islam. Before we find another reason to hate each other, let it be clear that just because one guy, who happens to be a Muslim is apprehended, does not mean that Islam has been apprehended. And if Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal goes on trial, the only people who will put Islam on trial will be his supporters, not the government of Kenya.
BACK TO BLOGS: Retweet or *&%$ Off
Hello.
This is Potash and I am on my last glass of muratina. It is a new year. Maybe you noticed earlier but I just noticed now. Which is to say that after drinking for the last 30 days and waking up to sobriety every once in a while to see what the whole world was saying and trying to engage them on Twitter and Facebook, I realised that I have been speaking to myself.
I have X number of followers on Twitter and I have Z number of friends on Facebook, but that not withstanding, no one listens to me.
Let us face it, I have been on these interwebs too long and the one thing that has remained a constant is that I am one of the few people who does not tweet inanities. I mean, no one knows what my ablution is about. No, that is too low; no one even knows where I live. But still, as bland retweets go, no one mentions me.
The thing is that I know people who are famous. Not, merely famous online but really, famous. Famous in the real world. People who get to sign up for real writing gigs (which is what I want to be doing). And people who are famous for writing about their toilet.
I know people who are not famous but who still get to travel around the world talking about Africa and all that shit. You know, the Africa that doesn’t exist outside a made up space of: AFRICA. Yes, the Africa in capital letters of new media that says: Africa is not a country. Africa is inventing new media gizmos.
I am tired, drunk and incoherent, and my little corner of Nairobi is cold. But most important of all, I am tired of being used. I am tired of people calling me when they want me to do stuff for them. I am tired of people ‘DMing’ and ‘Inboxing’ me just to see they like the way I think. If you like the way I think, for fucks sake do not tell me, tell it to your world. Your 19 friends on Twitter. Why the hell do you want to keep my genius secret as though I was your second wife?
I am talking a lot of crap now but when this muratina is done, one thing will be certain: I am going back to blogging. The other thing, though not as certain now, is that I am purging my ‘followers’ and ‘friends’ list. That is to say that if you are in my virtual space and you do not to seem to like my nonsense enough to share it with your ‘friends’ and ‘followers’, I am cutting you out.
It might sound stupid but what the hell? I am a writer and in this digital media times; these times of ‘press button publishing’ you are as big as your network. And clearly, my network is not as big. Which is to say that POTASH is not big. And, frankly, if I cannot get as big as my friends, then I could as well, get new friends. So, retweet, or bust.
I am out.
A Kenyan Urban Narrative or a variant of it returns as soon as the booze gets out of my head.
In the meantime, thanks to all the people who have kept me in alcohol right through Christmas and new years. I could not have made this decision without you.
For all the people who have failed me in my writing career so far- and you know who you are- *&%^ you. And for all of you who have ignored me online, *&^% you too. And all you that have not paid me for what I wrote: *&^% you too. N.M: *&%$; Dinda; Mambo; Kamwana et al: *&^% you too. Kenyan mainstream media: *&^% you too. Kenyans on Twitter: *&^% you. My friends on Facebook: *&^% you.
Follow me on Twitter only if you are intent on retweeting: @POTASH
P.S: Most important of all, you might have been telling your friends that you know the cat that runs this blog, but between me and you, we know that you do not. You know N.M coz he is a yuppie bastard like you!
This is Potash and I am on my last glass of muratina. It is a new year. Maybe you noticed earlier but I just noticed now. Which is to say that after drinking for the last 30 days and waking up to sobriety every once in a while to see what the whole world was saying and trying to engage them on Twitter and Facebook, I realised that I have been speaking to myself.
I have X number of followers on Twitter and I have Z number of friends on Facebook, but that not withstanding, no one listens to me.
Let us face it, I have been on these interwebs too long and the one thing that has remained a constant is that I am one of the few people who does not tweet inanities. I mean, no one knows what my ablution is about. No, that is too low; no one even knows where I live. But still, as bland retweets go, no one mentions me.
The thing is that I know people who are famous. Not, merely famous online but really, famous. Famous in the real world. People who get to sign up for real writing gigs (which is what I want to be doing). And people who are famous for writing about their toilet.
I know people who are not famous but who still get to travel around the world talking about Africa and all that shit. You know, the Africa that doesn’t exist outside a made up space of: AFRICA. Yes, the Africa in capital letters of new media that says: Africa is not a country. Africa is inventing new media gizmos.
I am tired, drunk and incoherent, and my little corner of Nairobi is cold. But most important of all, I am tired of being used. I am tired of people calling me when they want me to do stuff for them. I am tired of people ‘DMing’ and ‘Inboxing’ me just to see they like the way I think. If you like the way I think, for fucks sake do not tell me, tell it to your world. Your 19 friends on Twitter. Why the hell do you want to keep my genius secret as though I was your second wife?
I am talking a lot of crap now but when this muratina is done, one thing will be certain: I am going back to blogging. The other thing, though not as certain now, is that I am purging my ‘followers’ and ‘friends’ list. That is to say that if you are in my virtual space and you do not to seem to like my nonsense enough to share it with your ‘friends’ and ‘followers’, I am cutting you out.
It might sound stupid but what the hell? I am a writer and in this digital media times; these times of ‘press button publishing’ you are as big as your network. And clearly, my network is not as big. Which is to say that POTASH is not big. And, frankly, if I cannot get as big as my friends, then I could as well, get new friends. So, retweet, or bust.
I am out.
A Kenyan Urban Narrative or a variant of it returns as soon as the booze gets out of my head.
In the meantime, thanks to all the people who have kept me in alcohol right through Christmas and new years. I could not have made this decision without you.
For all the people who have failed me in my writing career so far- and you know who you are- *&%^ you. And for all of you who have ignored me online, *&^% you too. And all you that have not paid me for what I wrote: *&^% you too. N.M: *&%$; Dinda; Mambo; Kamwana et al: *&^% you too. Kenyan mainstream media: *&^% you too. Kenyans on Twitter: *&^% you. My friends on Facebook: *&^% you.
Follow me on Twitter only if you are intent on retweeting: @POTASH
P.S: Most important of all, you might have been telling your friends that you know the cat that runs this blog, but between me and you, we know that you do not. You know N.M coz he is a yuppie bastard like you!
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
A(nother) Nice Laugh at Aid Inc.
The Aid industry takes a ridiculous turn more as a rule than as an exception. This ridiculousness finds a zenith point- one that is quickly multiplied- the moment the Aid industry makes contact with Africa. The reason is simple: Africa, still remains, the great unknown. At least in the eyes of your average Westerner. What becomes clear is that while philanthropy in Western soil is a direct response to clearly discernible dispossession; an attempt to ameliorate the self-evident vagaries and social-economic divides that Capitalism inevitably produces, with Africa that philanthropy responds to a different reality. That of the imaginary.
The problem with Africa, in the eyes of the average Western philanthropist, is that which citizens of the West first imagine and then declare to be the problem. And for where there is a problem as solution must be provided. So the Aid industry comes in, bungling on its way and making the rules as it progresses, with solutions to Africa’s problems. But no one really asks the Africa: what is your problem?
In the end, for every imagined problem, an imagined solution. And because every Westerner who has a mind to can come to Africa and become the change, then for every Westerner in Africa a set of imaginary problems and one of imaginary solutions to match. Suddenly, in a crowded field of solutions, the need to be groundbreaking arises and since all the sane things have been done it seems as though the competition begins to be one for the most ridiculous solutions.
It is all so funny that I have always felt that, with the mounting critiques of the Aid industry, the only response left to some of us is satire. Why, I ask, should I bother with learned critiques while the Moyos and the Easterlys can do a far much better job of it? It really is the reason why I (N.M) set up the Black Campaign and borrowed the line this blog, Don’t Come to Africa, Send Money. (That I haven’t done a good job at keeping the satire coming is a different story all together).
That aside, it is always refreshing to see Bill Easterly come up with the sort of hilarious post he did this Tuesday where he wrote:
Apart from the final four paragraphs, this post is culled from the draft of an incomplete essay by Njoroge Matathia.
The problem with Africa, in the eyes of the average Western philanthropist, is that which citizens of the West first imagine and then declare to be the problem. And for where there is a problem as solution must be provided. So the Aid industry comes in, bungling on its way and making the rules as it progresses, with solutions to Africa’s problems. But no one really asks the Africa: what is your problem?
In the end, for every imagined problem, an imagined solution. And because every Westerner who has a mind to can come to Africa and become the change, then for every Westerner in Africa a set of imaginary problems and one of imaginary solutions to match. Suddenly, in a crowded field of solutions, the need to be groundbreaking arises and since all the sane things have been done it seems as though the competition begins to be one for the most ridiculous solutions.
It is all so funny that I have always felt that, with the mounting critiques of the Aid industry, the only response left to some of us is satire. Why, I ask, should I bother with learned critiques while the Moyos and the Easterlys can do a far much better job of it? It really is the reason why I (N.M) set up the Black Campaign and borrowed the line this blog, Don’t Come to Africa, Send Money. (That I haven’t done a good job at keeping the satire coming is a different story all together).
That aside, it is always refreshing to see Bill Easterly come up with the sort of hilarious post he did this Tuesday where he wrote:
“An expert commission of African leaders today announced their plan for comprehensive reform of music band U2. Saying that U2’s rock had lost touch with its African roots, the commission called for urgent measures to halt U2’s slide towards impending crisis.”That aside, I must admit that I love Bono the musician while Bono the activist makes me gag. Well, of course I mean Bono the activist for Africa because the Bono (and U2) of Sunday Bloody Sunday did once speak to the social conscience of my youthful years. And yes, I still do like to listen to U2. Oh, and didn’t Adam Clayton live in Kenya for a bit when he was little?
Apart from the final four paragraphs, this post is culled from the draft of an incomplete essay by Njoroge Matathia.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
AS I SLIDE DEEPER INTO OBLIVION
Writing, I have learnt, is about a time and a place. I am not claiming to speak a universal truth, just what my experience has taught me. It could be a truth about others, and then again it might not be. But it is a truth about me; a self-revelation and maybe, especially in times of drug induced self-analysis, an epiphany. That truth, simply, I write better when here. Here being the ‘old neighbourhood’. The place where what later became known as A Kenyan Urban Narrative began. The space, next to and a little to the left of Mutua’s kiosk, where we sat on stones, sipped on Napshizzle and wrote.
I have spent the last few months in and out of this place. In and out of this place trying to track old friends and make new acquaintances with the hope of reconstituting The Potash Book Club. In and out of this place trying to find an entry back in and be able to, once again, call this home. My successes have been way too few and far in between. Most of the old friends are long gone; most of the new acquaintances are too young and ‘intellectually’ distant from me. It really is a shame about the kids that hang out here now, they idle away their time just like we used to, but they do not indulge their mental faculties in the same way we did. They drink a lot more than we did and read a hell of a lot less. Which is polite for: They read nothing.
In truth, I have had only one real success, here, in the last two weeks. I have been writing. Writing seems like the only way I profit from being here. And when you think that it is the writing that took me out of this place, to begin with, and about the only thing I took with me, then it seems as though that has always been the worth of this place to me. But it isn’t and it shouldn’t appear to be so. This place gave me writing and a lot else too. A lot else like friendship and the camaraderie and firm bond of a shared experience. Family. At least all that when it lasted because I do not feel it anymore.
Trying to reconnect with this place, I feel like all the things that this place gave me have been stripped away and all that is left is the writing. The writing that seems to come to me, words and sentences instinctively forming in my head, the moment I enter this neighbourhood. The only thing being that then more I stay, the more time I spend talking to people here, the swifter the words and sentences arrange themselves into paragraphs.
Over the years, after I first left, I felt as though my writing was getting bland. Worse still, I felt as though I had lost familiarity with my writing voice. That I had even no story left in me to tell. Sometimes, agonised to tears, I would come down this way. Come down in search of both the muse and voice I believed I had left behind. But nothing. All these trips turned out to be were pilgrimages to the past of a writing me. A past not grand in itself but at least one that was insurmountably better than my present. A present of more craft and less art. A present of words correctly spelled, sentences well punctuated and, alas, no story.
It is then that I realised that the audiences might be out there but my writing lived down here. So, with big little steps, I have been working on my return. My return to this place where what later became known as A Kenyan Urban Narrative was born. A place where audiences will elude me but my writing will get better. A place where I can write and write and hope to be read, at least, when I am dead.
And with yet another, perfunctory Hello World of a blog post behind me, do allow me to return to the real writing.
I have spent the last few months in and out of this place. In and out of this place trying to track old friends and make new acquaintances with the hope of reconstituting The Potash Book Club. In and out of this place trying to find an entry back in and be able to, once again, call this home. My successes have been way too few and far in between. Most of the old friends are long gone; most of the new acquaintances are too young and ‘intellectually’ distant from me. It really is a shame about the kids that hang out here now, they idle away their time just like we used to, but they do not indulge their mental faculties in the same way we did. They drink a lot more than we did and read a hell of a lot less. Which is polite for: They read nothing.
In truth, I have had only one real success, here, in the last two weeks. I have been writing. Writing seems like the only way I profit from being here. And when you think that it is the writing that took me out of this place, to begin with, and about the only thing I took with me, then it seems as though that has always been the worth of this place to me. But it isn’t and it shouldn’t appear to be so. This place gave me writing and a lot else too. A lot else like friendship and the camaraderie and firm bond of a shared experience. Family. At least all that when it lasted because I do not feel it anymore.
Trying to reconnect with this place, I feel like all the things that this place gave me have been stripped away and all that is left is the writing. The writing that seems to come to me, words and sentences instinctively forming in my head, the moment I enter this neighbourhood. The only thing being that then more I stay, the more time I spend talking to people here, the swifter the words and sentences arrange themselves into paragraphs.
Over the years, after I first left, I felt as though my writing was getting bland. Worse still, I felt as though I had lost familiarity with my writing voice. That I had even no story left in me to tell. Sometimes, agonised to tears, I would come down this way. Come down in search of both the muse and voice I believed I had left behind. But nothing. All these trips turned out to be were pilgrimages to the past of a writing me. A past not grand in itself but at least one that was insurmountably better than my present. A present of more craft and less art. A present of words correctly spelled, sentences well punctuated and, alas, no story.
It is then that I realised that the audiences might be out there but my writing lived down here. So, with big little steps, I have been working on my return. My return to this place where what later became known as A Kenyan Urban Narrative was born. A place where audiences will elude me but my writing will get better. A place where I can write and write and hope to be read, at least, when I am dead.
And with yet another, perfunctory Hello World of a blog post behind me, do allow me to return to the real writing.
Saturday, November 07, 2009
THE STRAIGHT MAN'S BIBLE OF KINKY SEX?
I have long learnt the folly of using the Bible as an excuse/ explanation/ Justification for anything. When I was a young boy, growing up in a very Christian family, I was taught that the Bible was the word of God. “In the beginning was the Word,” the Gospel according to John begins, “and the Word was God.”
Then I grew older, read a lot more than the Bible, and suddenly it was like Jesus Christ himself was standing before me yelling: Ephphatha. Open up. And the eye of my mind become open to the fact that if the Bible was indeed the Word of God, then God is man’s literary plumbing. The truth of the Bible became to me not the words but the words and meanings that men put into it. And there could be as many truths in the Bible as there were men who would care to read it. I could find my own version of truth in the Bible as much as the next man could find theirs, or in some cases, the lack thereof. The Bible thus became for me not the word of God but an oracle as crazy as its next reader.
I still read the Bible, but now only as an exceptional work of literature and philosophy. And to this day, the book of John remains one of the texts I admire the most. From a literary point of view, of course. The Jesus in the Gospel of John has the eloquence of Khalil Gibran’s prophet retold in the mystical realist voice of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I say these things because one of my Facebook Friends brought an interesting website to my attention. Sex In Christ- Sexuality according to the word of God, a site that argues that threesomes are scripturally, kosher as long as it is a husband and two women (two men and one woman is homo, silly!) has to be read to be believed.
This site, which reminds us that sex between two men is condemned by the Bible but that joining your wife and her girlfriend in bed is holy in matrimony, must have been written by a heterosexual male pervert who uses the Songs of Solomon to jerk off. If it was up to me, the site should be called The Straight Man’s Bible of Kinky Sex.
But before I let you go and leave the site to speak for itself let me tell you why, according to that site of course, anal sex (before marriage, no less) is in accordance with God’s will:
But no, why don't you go find that out for yourself... I have drugs to abuse!
Then I grew older, read a lot more than the Bible, and suddenly it was like Jesus Christ himself was standing before me yelling: Ephphatha. Open up. And the eye of my mind become open to the fact that if the Bible was indeed the Word of God, then God is man’s literary plumbing. The truth of the Bible became to me not the words but the words and meanings that men put into it. And there could be as many truths in the Bible as there were men who would care to read it. I could find my own version of truth in the Bible as much as the next man could find theirs, or in some cases, the lack thereof. The Bible thus became for me not the word of God but an oracle as crazy as its next reader.
I still read the Bible, but now only as an exceptional work of literature and philosophy. And to this day, the book of John remains one of the texts I admire the most. From a literary point of view, of course. The Jesus in the Gospel of John has the eloquence of Khalil Gibran’s prophet retold in the mystical realist voice of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I say these things because one of my Facebook Friends brought an interesting website to my attention. Sex In Christ- Sexuality according to the word of God, a site that argues that threesomes are scripturally, kosher as long as it is a husband and two women (two men and one woman is homo, silly!) has to be read to be believed.
This site, which reminds us that sex between two men is condemned by the Bible but that joining your wife and her girlfriend in bed is holy in matrimony, must have been written by a heterosexual male pervert who uses the Songs of Solomon to jerk off. If it was up to me, the site should be called The Straight Man’s Bible of Kinky Sex.
But before I let you go and leave the site to speak for itself let me tell you why, according to that site of course, anal sex (before marriage, no less) is in accordance with God’s will:
“Are you saving yourself for your wedding night? The Devil wants you to fail, that’s why he puts stumbling blocks in your way. But God wants you to succeed, and that’s why he has given us an alternative to intercourse before marriage: anal sex. Through anal sex, you can satisfy your body’s needs, while you avoid the risk of unwanted pregnancy and still keep yourself pure for marriage.
You may be shocked at first by this idea. Isn’t anal sex (sodomy) forbidden by the Bible? Isn’t anal sex dirty? What’s the difference between having anal sex before marriage and having regular intercourse? Let’s address these issues by debunking some myths about anal sex and God's will.”
But no, why don't you go find that out for yourself... I have drugs to abuse!
Sunday, November 01, 2009
CONSTITUTIONS DON’T MAKE HOMOPHILES
“That's what the niggers don't realize,” says Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed (2006), “If I got one thing against the black chappies, it's this - no one gives it to you. You have to take it.” It is the same problem with Kenya’s gay activists, or so thinks our guest blogger. Njoroge Matathia of The Black Campaign returns to these pages with a demand for a more forceful political and social engagement on gay issues in Kenya. Arguing that in the eyes of the Kenyan public there are no homosexuals here, he concludes that the gay community has itself to blame for the perpetuation of that misconception. Matathia then proceeds to call for a more public approach to activism and falls slightly short of demanding that the gay movement radicalise.
We share these opinions, our emphasis though being on the need for radicalism, but if he has failed to express them succinctly in his rather long essay then the fault is his and not that of this blog.
***
by Njoroge Matathia
“The union is abnormal. As an African and a church leader, I am ashamed. We should advice others not to do the same,”1 Anglican Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, said. He was responding to the news of a wedding between two Kenyan men held in London recently. A wedding that, according to media reports, Kenyan religious leaders have described as “unacceptable and unnatural”.
The Archbishop’s point of view I respect, it is his collation of Christianity and ‘Africanness’ that I sneer upon. I desired to respond to that, point out the irony in a casual call to ‘Africanness’ by someone whose job description begins with ‘Anglican’ but I held back telling myself that I, like him, would be missing the point. The point being: A wedding.
People love weddings. Love weddings because they are a celebratory rite of passage into that much revered social status of Married. Weddings usher in marriage, the only state within which societal sanctions allow you, nay, consider you respectable enough to have sex and to raise a family. Ideally, weddings are seen as a celebration of love between two people. A love so deep and special that those that share it declare it publicly and make a commitment to love and care for each other until death parts them.
Weddings let the whole world know that X loves Y. Weddings say: Charles Ngengi loves Daniel Chege Gichia and promises to do so, forever after. Love and companionship are the dominant tropes weddings sell with sex remaining a subtext too subtle to be discerned by the youngling flower-girls and pages who these events are meant to and do inspire.
But when Njenga wedded Gachie, the tables turned. Sex was elevated from subtext to issue- the only issue. Worse still, it was as though a sexual pervert had stood up in public and threatened: I, Charles Ngengi swear I will bugger that Chege guy to death! And over the next few days our MSM (pun intended) and online media spaces proceeded to work up and host what seems like a national disgust at the idea of, not just any men but two Kenyan men having sex with each other. For once an opportunity, to see and hopefully discuss homosexuality as more than sexual intercourse between people of the same biological sex, was ours to grab. Kenya, as a nation wasted that chance, the Kenyan gay community- its so called activists, specifically- squandered it.
The Kenyan gay community had a chance to say, look it is not just about sex, it is about human relationships. If we must talk about sex, then let us begin with the fact that two gay girls can meet, date and fall in love without ever having had sex. You know, just like with ‘normal’ people, if one partner is not ready then she just is not ready. And if you really care about that person and that relationship then you, well, wait. Sometimes a gay boy sees another boy and is filled with lust for him- you know, just the way a straight boy would feel about a girl- he propositions him and if the other is good to go, then he is good to go. Bottom line is casual sex is simply that, casual sex. If the issue is sex, then all sex is sex regardless of where your penis ends up. Thank you very much for your questions but we must now move on to a more important conversation: Sexuality.
Gay folks, in Kenya, did not do that. They neither pre-empted public debate’s, predictable, slide into how gross gay sex is nor attempted to shift it back to sexuality and lifestyle choices when it did. Right from the get go, the homophobes came out to play and for now the ball remains in their court. Maybe until Moreno Ocampo arrives next week and Kenyans can forget that small bit of gay silliness and get back to real issues: politics. Get back to politics the deafening silence of the Kenyan gay community having once again established the fact that there are no gay people in Kenya. That there are no gay Kenyans, just a few misguided youngsters who knowing no better allow themselves to be fooled by mzungus and their money into allowing themselves to be sexually abused. I mean, wasn’t that Ngengi guy lured by a mzungu guy to London? Now he is recruiting for them and we do not know what to do but leave our children to the grace of God.
Granted that, in truth, there exists a huge gay community in Kenya, nobody is gay in Kenya. A paradox it may seem until you consider that physical existence is never a guarantee of social existence. In colonial Kenya, the Africans it was said were to be seen but not heard, it is worse for gay people in Kenya today- they can neither be seen nor heard. In those days, the Africans lived at the social periphery- their existence known but their presence ignored- but gay people are living in social cemetery- unheard of and unknown. Gay people in Kenya are not ignored, they do not exist.
Because gay people do not exist in Kenya is it not preposterous to enshrine gay rights in our constitution; protect the interest of homosexuals as a distinct category? As we speak the Committee of Experts on Constitutional Review, charged with preparing a draft constitution soon to be put to referendum, has stated that they will not include gay rights in the draft. In a telling, if slightly ironic statement, the Nation reported a member of the committee, Mr. Otiende Amolo, as saying that
“[t]he new constitution is supposed to cater for the interests of both the majority and minorities, […] but same-sex marriages had been rejected by all religious groups.”2
Of great import too is the manner in which the issue of gay rights was, allegedly, presented to the committee. Mr. Amolo, it is reported, said:
"On several occasions some British MPs have approached us on the gay matter. They wanted us to include homosexual and lesbians' rights in the draft. But we told them that such a thing cannot happen because if we did so, a majority of Kenyans will reject the draft during the forthcoming referendum."3
Assuming the Mr. Amolo was not misquoted, then two things become self-evident. First, that consensus amongst all religious groups (their leaders to be precise) means consensus amongst all Kenyan minorities and majorities. Second, that gay rights were only put on the committee’s agenda (not by any Kenyan or group of Kenyans) by foreigners. By British MPs, specifically, in whose country two Kenyans have already found a safe haven for their ‘unnatural and unacceptable’ union. The two points together speak to the argument- proven through deduction by the lack of any memoranda from gay Kenyans to the committee- that there are no gay people in Kenya.
Big jump, maybe, from weddings to constitution making but with it a significant reframing of the homosexuality debate. To begin with, though the stance against homosexuality taken by the religious groups is based on their moral and doctrinal perspectives, by arguing these points in a political space, they politicise homosexuality. By not responding- in political spaces- to the politicisation of their way of life the Kenyan gay community cedes any political ground there is to be won. Importantly, by not being the first to politicise their interests, the gay community becomes relegated to the unfortunate place of second guessing the political agenda set by their opponents.
It can be argued that their existence being, technically, illegal in Kenya means that homosexuals cannot publicly present memoranda. But truth is that declaring oneself to be a homosexual in Kenya is not in and of itself illegal. While Kenyan law criminalises acts- sodomy and the cryptic ‘acts against the order of nature’- it is society that anathematises homosexuality as a concept, identity and lifestyle. Thus, a public declaration of ones homosexuality puts you in danger of social ostracism and mob justice rather than criminal prosecution and jail. Therefore, if the written law and social values were two cats, gay rights a mouse and we had only one bell, which one ought we to bell first? The more vicious one of course; social stigmatisation of homosexuality rather than the laws that purportedly criminalise it.
And the first steps towards fighting social stigma are a broader public awareness of the stigmatised social reality coupled with, hopefully, a level of acceptance or, at the very least, tolerance.
Unfortunately, acceptance or tolerance are processes rather than events; fortunately, what is sought is not universal acceptance or tolerance but a modicum of it. It is in this environment that changes in the law begin to make sense. Laws in themselves do not change people, reason does. If it were, by any wild chance, possible to enshrine the rights of sexual minorities in the Kenyan constitution now, the only thing the gay community would come out with is the lesson that constitutions do not make homophiles. Just look at South Africa and their much celebrated gay friendly constitution and then look at their statistics on the ‘corrective rape’4 of lesbians.
But all is not lost. The rights that gay Kenyans deserve can be achieved but they will have to be earned. They will have to fight for them on two fronts, the social and the political. In the social, an intense public awareness campaign around gay issues must be embarked on. One that begins with the subtle and progresses towards the blatant. Think of a move from pamphlets, stickers and other merchandise in not only English but also Kiswahili and other languages. These can be dropped at market centres, people’s doorsteps and such places. Guerrilla social marketing, if there is such a thing. With time it will even be possible to have a gay character in a local TV show. The key thing, though, is to target rural areas more than the urban ones.
The political front is the hard part. The Kenyan gay community will need martyrs for this. It must be borne in mind that all significant political change in this country has been cut with blood. Why should gay people hope to be any luckier? They must get out on the street and march for their freedom, wipe off the spit and blood from their torn bodies and souls and march again. History has taught that easy civil rights victories are few and far in between. In the meantime gay Kenyans must ask themselves not what laws are against them but what laws are for them.
What laws protect them not as homosexuals but as both citizens of Kenya and human beings? Does the Sexual Offences Act limit rape to actions against heterosexuals? Does the penal code say, categorically, that the assault, infliction of grievous bodily harm or the murder of a homosexual is not a crime? Because lawyers, judges and policemen are products of our homophobic environment, it means that crimes committed against homosexuals do not get prosecuted, do not find their way into civil court and if they did the offender could claim the victim’s sexuality as a mitigating circumstance or cause for extreme provocation. But for how long can a precedent setting prosecution remain elusive? Haven’t we seen one yet?
It is alongside laws that rights and responsibilities exist. One great argument proposed by sexual rights activists, and one that I have used often in other writings, frames sexual orientation within the language of rights. That sexual (orientation) rights are human rights. Unfortunately rights are a moral issue that can only become legally relevant when they are politicised. And as we have seen, the Kenyan gay community has lost both the moral and the political argument. They have lost by default merely by not being seen and heard, in any significant way, enough to count as a constituent demographic group in Kenya. They have lost the advantage of having drawn first blood; stepping up and stepping out to frame the public discourse on homosexuality in their favour. They have refused to exist validating the myth of their non-existence through inaction.
It is this lack of political action and a refusal to engage the public on their issues that irks me the most about gay activists in Kenya. If they are involved in any activism at all then it plays out in formal spaces socially and intellectually distant from the broader publics they need win over. They play safe- talking heads at conferences that preach to the converted- while the world out there is living in the blissful heathenism of homophobia. “We are here, we are gay,” they whisper to each other inside their closet and then wonder, at the next exclusive conference, why no one knows they exist.
1. http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/673614/-/uo10l1/-/index.html
2. http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/674074/-/uo1kcr/-/index.html
3. http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/674074/-/uo1kcr/-/index.html
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrective_rape
Njoroge Matathia is a Nairobi based writer and social scientist. He can be reached at http://theblackcampaign.org Check that site over the next few days for a downloadable PDF version of this essay.
We share these opinions, our emphasis though being on the need for radicalism, but if he has failed to express them succinctly in his rather long essay then the fault is his and not that of this blog.
***
by Njoroge Matathia
“The union is abnormal. As an African and a church leader, I am ashamed. We should advice others not to do the same,”1 Anglican Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, said. He was responding to the news of a wedding between two Kenyan men held in London recently. A wedding that, according to media reports, Kenyan religious leaders have described as “unacceptable and unnatural”.
The Archbishop’s point of view I respect, it is his collation of Christianity and ‘Africanness’ that I sneer upon. I desired to respond to that, point out the irony in a casual call to ‘Africanness’ by someone whose job description begins with ‘Anglican’ but I held back telling myself that I, like him, would be missing the point. The point being: A wedding.
People love weddings. Love weddings because they are a celebratory rite of passage into that much revered social status of Married. Weddings usher in marriage, the only state within which societal sanctions allow you, nay, consider you respectable enough to have sex and to raise a family. Ideally, weddings are seen as a celebration of love between two people. A love so deep and special that those that share it declare it publicly and make a commitment to love and care for each other until death parts them.
Weddings let the whole world know that X loves Y. Weddings say: Charles Ngengi loves Daniel Chege Gichia and promises to do so, forever after. Love and companionship are the dominant tropes weddings sell with sex remaining a subtext too subtle to be discerned by the youngling flower-girls and pages who these events are meant to and do inspire.
But when Njenga wedded Gachie, the tables turned. Sex was elevated from subtext to issue- the only issue. Worse still, it was as though a sexual pervert had stood up in public and threatened: I, Charles Ngengi swear I will bugger that Chege guy to death! And over the next few days our MSM (pun intended) and online media spaces proceeded to work up and host what seems like a national disgust at the idea of, not just any men but two Kenyan men having sex with each other. For once an opportunity, to see and hopefully discuss homosexuality as more than sexual intercourse between people of the same biological sex, was ours to grab. Kenya, as a nation wasted that chance, the Kenyan gay community- its so called activists, specifically- squandered it.
The Kenyan gay community had a chance to say, look it is not just about sex, it is about human relationships. If we must talk about sex, then let us begin with the fact that two gay girls can meet, date and fall in love without ever having had sex. You know, just like with ‘normal’ people, if one partner is not ready then she just is not ready. And if you really care about that person and that relationship then you, well, wait. Sometimes a gay boy sees another boy and is filled with lust for him- you know, just the way a straight boy would feel about a girl- he propositions him and if the other is good to go, then he is good to go. Bottom line is casual sex is simply that, casual sex. If the issue is sex, then all sex is sex regardless of where your penis ends up. Thank you very much for your questions but we must now move on to a more important conversation: Sexuality.
Gay folks, in Kenya, did not do that. They neither pre-empted public debate’s, predictable, slide into how gross gay sex is nor attempted to shift it back to sexuality and lifestyle choices when it did. Right from the get go, the homophobes came out to play and for now the ball remains in their court. Maybe until Moreno Ocampo arrives next week and Kenyans can forget that small bit of gay silliness and get back to real issues: politics. Get back to politics the deafening silence of the Kenyan gay community having once again established the fact that there are no gay people in Kenya. That there are no gay Kenyans, just a few misguided youngsters who knowing no better allow themselves to be fooled by mzungus and their money into allowing themselves to be sexually abused. I mean, wasn’t that Ngengi guy lured by a mzungu guy to London? Now he is recruiting for them and we do not know what to do but leave our children to the grace of God.
Granted that, in truth, there exists a huge gay community in Kenya, nobody is gay in Kenya. A paradox it may seem until you consider that physical existence is never a guarantee of social existence. In colonial Kenya, the Africans it was said were to be seen but not heard, it is worse for gay people in Kenya today- they can neither be seen nor heard. In those days, the Africans lived at the social periphery- their existence known but their presence ignored- but gay people are living in social cemetery- unheard of and unknown. Gay people in Kenya are not ignored, they do not exist.
Because gay people do not exist in Kenya is it not preposterous to enshrine gay rights in our constitution; protect the interest of homosexuals as a distinct category? As we speak the Committee of Experts on Constitutional Review, charged with preparing a draft constitution soon to be put to referendum, has stated that they will not include gay rights in the draft. In a telling, if slightly ironic statement, the Nation reported a member of the committee, Mr. Otiende Amolo, as saying that
“[t]he new constitution is supposed to cater for the interests of both the majority and minorities, […] but same-sex marriages had been rejected by all religious groups.”2
Of great import too is the manner in which the issue of gay rights was, allegedly, presented to the committee. Mr. Amolo, it is reported, said:
"On several occasions some British MPs have approached us on the gay matter. They wanted us to include homosexual and lesbians' rights in the draft. But we told them that such a thing cannot happen because if we did so, a majority of Kenyans will reject the draft during the forthcoming referendum."3
Assuming the Mr. Amolo was not misquoted, then two things become self-evident. First, that consensus amongst all religious groups (their leaders to be precise) means consensus amongst all Kenyan minorities and majorities. Second, that gay rights were only put on the committee’s agenda (not by any Kenyan or group of Kenyans) by foreigners. By British MPs, specifically, in whose country two Kenyans have already found a safe haven for their ‘unnatural and unacceptable’ union. The two points together speak to the argument- proven through deduction by the lack of any memoranda from gay Kenyans to the committee- that there are no gay people in Kenya.
Big jump, maybe, from weddings to constitution making but with it a significant reframing of the homosexuality debate. To begin with, though the stance against homosexuality taken by the religious groups is based on their moral and doctrinal perspectives, by arguing these points in a political space, they politicise homosexuality. By not responding- in political spaces- to the politicisation of their way of life the Kenyan gay community cedes any political ground there is to be won. Importantly, by not being the first to politicise their interests, the gay community becomes relegated to the unfortunate place of second guessing the political agenda set by their opponents.
It can be argued that their existence being, technically, illegal in Kenya means that homosexuals cannot publicly present memoranda. But truth is that declaring oneself to be a homosexual in Kenya is not in and of itself illegal. While Kenyan law criminalises acts- sodomy and the cryptic ‘acts against the order of nature’- it is society that anathematises homosexuality as a concept, identity and lifestyle. Thus, a public declaration of ones homosexuality puts you in danger of social ostracism and mob justice rather than criminal prosecution and jail. Therefore, if the written law and social values were two cats, gay rights a mouse and we had only one bell, which one ought we to bell first? The more vicious one of course; social stigmatisation of homosexuality rather than the laws that purportedly criminalise it.
And the first steps towards fighting social stigma are a broader public awareness of the stigmatised social reality coupled with, hopefully, a level of acceptance or, at the very least, tolerance.
Unfortunately, acceptance or tolerance are processes rather than events; fortunately, what is sought is not universal acceptance or tolerance but a modicum of it. It is in this environment that changes in the law begin to make sense. Laws in themselves do not change people, reason does. If it were, by any wild chance, possible to enshrine the rights of sexual minorities in the Kenyan constitution now, the only thing the gay community would come out with is the lesson that constitutions do not make homophiles. Just look at South Africa and their much celebrated gay friendly constitution and then look at their statistics on the ‘corrective rape’4 of lesbians.
But all is not lost. The rights that gay Kenyans deserve can be achieved but they will have to be earned. They will have to fight for them on two fronts, the social and the political. In the social, an intense public awareness campaign around gay issues must be embarked on. One that begins with the subtle and progresses towards the blatant. Think of a move from pamphlets, stickers and other merchandise in not only English but also Kiswahili and other languages. These can be dropped at market centres, people’s doorsteps and such places. Guerrilla social marketing, if there is such a thing. With time it will even be possible to have a gay character in a local TV show. The key thing, though, is to target rural areas more than the urban ones.
The political front is the hard part. The Kenyan gay community will need martyrs for this. It must be borne in mind that all significant political change in this country has been cut with blood. Why should gay people hope to be any luckier? They must get out on the street and march for their freedom, wipe off the spit and blood from their torn bodies and souls and march again. History has taught that easy civil rights victories are few and far in between. In the meantime gay Kenyans must ask themselves not what laws are against them but what laws are for them.
What laws protect them not as homosexuals but as both citizens of Kenya and human beings? Does the Sexual Offences Act limit rape to actions against heterosexuals? Does the penal code say, categorically, that the assault, infliction of grievous bodily harm or the murder of a homosexual is not a crime? Because lawyers, judges and policemen are products of our homophobic environment, it means that crimes committed against homosexuals do not get prosecuted, do not find their way into civil court and if they did the offender could claim the victim’s sexuality as a mitigating circumstance or cause for extreme provocation. But for how long can a precedent setting prosecution remain elusive? Haven’t we seen one yet?
It is alongside laws that rights and responsibilities exist. One great argument proposed by sexual rights activists, and one that I have used often in other writings, frames sexual orientation within the language of rights. That sexual (orientation) rights are human rights. Unfortunately rights are a moral issue that can only become legally relevant when they are politicised. And as we have seen, the Kenyan gay community has lost both the moral and the political argument. They have lost by default merely by not being seen and heard, in any significant way, enough to count as a constituent demographic group in Kenya. They have lost the advantage of having drawn first blood; stepping up and stepping out to frame the public discourse on homosexuality in their favour. They have refused to exist validating the myth of their non-existence through inaction.
It is this lack of political action and a refusal to engage the public on their issues that irks me the most about gay activists in Kenya. If they are involved in any activism at all then it plays out in formal spaces socially and intellectually distant from the broader publics they need win over. They play safe- talking heads at conferences that preach to the converted- while the world out there is living in the blissful heathenism of homophobia. “We are here, we are gay,” they whisper to each other inside their closet and then wonder, at the next exclusive conference, why no one knows they exist.
1. http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/673614/-/uo10l1/-/index.html
2. http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/674074/-/uo1kcr/-/index.html
3. http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/674074/-/uo1kcr/-/index.html
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrective_rape
Njoroge Matathia is a Nairobi based writer and social scientist. He can be reached at http://theblackcampaign.org Check that site over the next few days for a downloadable PDF version of this essay.
Friday, October 30, 2009
NAIROBI NIGHTS: URBAN BEATS- The Party
It has been one of those times when the Nairobi cultural scene has more to offer than the time one has. And when I, who has so much idle time in his hands, says I am pressed for time, then you know it has been an intense schedule. The German cultural weeks, beginning October 18th and ending tomorrow have been particularly charming. But I only managed to attend two events: the screening of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (2006) and Wanuri Kahiu's 12 minutes long sci-fi Pumzi (2009) at the Goethe Institute. Too bad I cannot be bothered to write reviews because they are both really important movies in their own rights.
On the 27th of October, I was back at the Goethe Institute for the opening of IngridMwangiRobertHutter's exhibition, Intruders. Ingrid Mwangi was born, to a Kenyan father and German mother, in Nairobi in 1970 while Robert Hutter was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany in the same year. Together they form the 'artisticly inspeparable identity', IngridMwangiRobertHutter, through which they do their art and, as Hutter puts it, 'other things together'. Those other things include raising their four children. Intruders, on show till the 12th of November at the Goethe Institute, is IngridMwangiRobertHutter's first solo show in Kenya.
At the opening I met up with Andy Teichmann and Sasha Perera. Andy, who I did a night out with back in February, is one half of the techno DJs unit Teichmann Brothers while Sasha of the Berlin based eloctronic band Jahcoozi. The Teichmann Brothers and Jahcoozi will alongside the b-boy artist Raphael team up with the Kenyan acts of hip hop DJ Bob of Headbangaz, house and techno DJ Drazen and the Swahili hiphop crew of Uko Flani for a party to draw the curtain on the German Cultural Weeks. Christened URBAN BEATS, the party will be held at the Marshall's service workshop in the ground floor of Marshall's House on Loita Street from 9.00p.m on the night of October 30th.
*Unfortunately, I can neither post the event poster nor attach links because either blogger or bad internet will not allow me. I cannot even format the text!
On the 27th of October, I was back at the Goethe Institute for the opening of IngridMwangiRobertHutter's exhibition, Intruders. Ingrid Mwangi was born, to a Kenyan father and German mother, in Nairobi in 1970 while Robert Hutter was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany in the same year. Together they form the 'artisticly inspeparable identity', IngridMwangiRobertHutter, through which they do their art and, as Hutter puts it, 'other things together'. Those other things include raising their four children. Intruders, on show till the 12th of November at the Goethe Institute, is IngridMwangiRobertHutter's first solo show in Kenya.
At the opening I met up with Andy Teichmann and Sasha Perera. Andy, who I did a night out with back in February, is one half of the techno DJs unit Teichmann Brothers while Sasha of the Berlin based eloctronic band Jahcoozi. The Teichmann Brothers and Jahcoozi will alongside the b-boy artist Raphael team up with the Kenyan acts of hip hop DJ Bob of Headbangaz, house and techno DJ Drazen and the Swahili hiphop crew of Uko Flani for a party to draw the curtain on the German Cultural Weeks. Christened URBAN BEATS, the party will be held at the Marshall's service workshop in the ground floor of Marshall's House on Loita Street from 9.00p.m on the night of October 30th.
*Unfortunately, I can neither post the event poster nor attach links because either blogger or bad internet will not allow me. I cannot even format the text!
Sunday, October 25, 2009
POTASH BOOK CLUB: Letter to a Convict
Then he answered and spoke to me, saying, "This is the word of Potash to N-, saying, 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,' says commander of Armies.*
House,
Some people say that jail changes you, and it should. But that only if you are a criminal; a menace to the public, judged so by a system that is both fair and just. If on the other hand you are a prisoner of conscience, put away- the machinations of the unjust working in overdrive- to silence you, prison should not change you. Must never change you.
True revolutionaries; earnest believers in a just cause, can only be judged not by what they said before they went to prison but by what they say after. What did Kenyatta say when he left prison? What did those tortured under Moi say when they, finally, took over the reigns? What will you say, when tomorrow they set you free? That God is God all the time, huh? So let us forgive them for they know not what they do?
God is good, indeed. The God otherwise known as Capital.
It has been a long road since November 1997 when a third column was presented to you. Many have been martyred that no one will ever know of, many have sold out who history will judge harshly.
But one thing is certain, the Potash Book Club will rise again. Damn well it will, and this I swear by the spirit of our forefathers.
Potash
*Proper attribution for this quote is problematic. Early on in this decade, a slew of photocopies of handwritten texts were to be found circulating among the youth of several low income areas in Nairobi. Many of them contained lengthy passages from both Shakespeare and the Bible reworked with Kenyan characters and situations. With every subsequent photocopying, came redactions as is evident from this quote that is obviously originally sourced from the book of Zechariah, 4:6.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Homosexuality: A Brief Rant
Nothing irks me more than a bigot with a bad argument. With the reports, in the last week, of a marriage between two Kenyan gay men and the introduction of an Anti-Homosexuality Bill into the Uganda parliament, this type of bigot has come out to play. The basic argument: Homosexuality is both against Christianity and Africanness.
Previously, on this blog, we have had a quick read through of what the Bible- the foundation of Christianity- has to say on homosexuality. That we insist is our own reading of the Bible and respect the fact that others can choose to read it differently. Anyone can read the Bible and find in it justification for all manner of hateful behaviour and that, whether it be slavery or homophobia, we respect. Respect it in the same way we respect all other opinions even when they significantly diverge from ours. To respect the opinions of others does not make them right, but it calls upon them to respect ours too or at least gives us the right to demand that our opinions be respected.
The opinion, held unwaveringly on this blog, is that up there with other recognized freedoms, id est, speech, religious belief, ownership of property, et cetera, lies sexual orientation. Whether people are born homosexual or choose to be so is moot our concern being that there are human beings who are homosexual. Irrevocably homosexual. And because they are does not mean they deserve special rights. What they deserve is equal rights. In the language of rights, homosexuals should not exist as a distinct category, because they belong in the same one as Ours: human being. In the same vein, there should be no category of laws that address homosexuals, specifically.
We, also, hold that the greatest sexual crime is non-consensual sex; where consent is established- between adults of a sound mind- the law can go jerk off.
Rants aside, we hope to engage you more on the Bahati Bill in Uganda and the whole business of homosexuality and Africanness soon. With time, it can be hoped that our region will arrive at a decent place where you do not have to be a cow to demand that cows be slaughtered humanely. But before then, universal human rights, must claim martyrs. Stand up and be counted.
Tweet your vitriol to @Potash
Previously, on this blog, we have had a quick read through of what the Bible- the foundation of Christianity- has to say on homosexuality. That we insist is our own reading of the Bible and respect the fact that others can choose to read it differently. Anyone can read the Bible and find in it justification for all manner of hateful behaviour and that, whether it be slavery or homophobia, we respect. Respect it in the same way we respect all other opinions even when they significantly diverge from ours. To respect the opinions of others does not make them right, but it calls upon them to respect ours too or at least gives us the right to demand that our opinions be respected.
The opinion, held unwaveringly on this blog, is that up there with other recognized freedoms, id est, speech, religious belief, ownership of property, et cetera, lies sexual orientation. Whether people are born homosexual or choose to be so is moot our concern being that there are human beings who are homosexual. Irrevocably homosexual. And because they are does not mean they deserve special rights. What they deserve is equal rights. In the language of rights, homosexuals should not exist as a distinct category, because they belong in the same one as Ours: human being. In the same vein, there should be no category of laws that address homosexuals, specifically.
We, also, hold that the greatest sexual crime is non-consensual sex; where consent is established- between adults of a sound mind- the law can go jerk off.
Rants aside, we hope to engage you more on the Bahati Bill in Uganda and the whole business of homosexuality and Africanness soon. With time, it can be hoped that our region will arrive at a decent place where you do not have to be a cow to demand that cows be slaughtered humanely. But before then, universal human rights, must claim martyrs. Stand up and be counted.
Tweet your vitriol to @Potash
Friday, October 16, 2009
JUST A BAND ALBUM LAUNCH
Self-effacement might have led Just a Band to describe themselves as an Experimental Boy Band but what they have turned out to be is a cult. That is a thought, I must return to on another day, but for now I have to go hustle because money, El Nino or the lack of a ride cannot get in the way of my attending the launch of their sophomore album kesho. The album, simply titled 82, will be launched at The Godown Arts Center, Industrial Area.
Here are the details, also available on Facebook:
“We've just released our second album - 82 and we'll be putting it out there with song and dance. Join us on Saturday 17th October from 7pm at the Godown Arts Center till much later (with the help of DJ Drazen). The album will be on sale for... Kshs. 500.
Advance tickets: Kshs. 400
Gate tickets: Kshs. 500
Advance Tickets available from:
The Sound Africa Store,
Ground Floor, 20th Century Plaza
Mama Ngina Street
CBD, Nairobi
The Bonk Store (opposite Steers Westlands)
Bishan Plaza, below Black Diamond
Mpaka Road, Westlands
The Godown Arts Center,
Dunga Road, Industrial Area
Nairobi.
AND from any of us band members, should you meet us. :D
With the gracious support of Penya Africa, The Godown Arts Center, ESL, bONK, Kiss FM and Kiss TV.”
Just a Band is as Urban Kenya as it gets, and this blog is proud to big them up big time, now and in future.
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