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Fighting for the state while the nation splits apart

(This piece first run in the East African of February 11, 2008)

The ongoing negotiations between Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki’s administration and the Raila Odinga-led Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) should consider as one of their immediate aims a political settlement aimed not at making the militias lose their appetite for destruction but rather at ensuring that the security forces, and especially the army, are united enough to act effectively.

They have so far wrongly assumed that they are the sole actors in the ongoing drama and that the singular aim of their bitter contest is the taking or keeping of State House. Their hardline positions in the negotiations assume that time will force the opposite side to concede defeat, that other actors are stationary and have little part to play in the outcome.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are fighting over control of a state that presides over a Kenyan nation that is now threatening to split into opposed nationalities.

The prize of the state will be hollow and short-lived since the split in the nation undermines the very basis of state authority, which is significantly derived from the ability to deploy effective and obedient security forces.

THE INVISIBLE ELEPHANT AT Kofi Annan’s mediating table is the fact of the state so far failing to maintain a monopoly on the means of violence against ragtag, ill-equipped militias, and its constrained ability to call on its armed forces to enforce order due to the very ethnic calculus that is driving so much of the violence. If the state cannot function, then the Kenyan nation will not survive the forces tearing it violently apart.

If there is common ground shared by the Kibaki and Raila camps, it is their need to remain the primary drivers of events on the ground and for the political arena to maintain the shape it has had since independence. This ground is threatened.

President Kibaki and his key supporters will only remain relevant to their political base provided they can deliver order. This will be especially true as businesses continue to close in the unrest and refugees from Rift Valley stream into Central and other provinces. Yet their ability to deliver successfully is dependent on effective command and control of all branches of the security services. This, as has been noted earlier, is an increasingly fragile capability in the present atmosphere of ethnic animosity.

It creates a power vacuum now being filled by violent militias that are gaining legitimacy and material support from the administration’s political base by promising to deliver security and order. The stronger these militias, the more detrimental they are to ODM’s aspirations since they make it tougher for the Kibaki team to cede ground during the negotiations for fear of becoming politically isolated. The same applies to the militias in Rift Valley and Western Province that have so far identified themselves as pro-ODM.

They too expect order to be delivered. They differ from their pro-Kibaki counterparts in expecting the ODM leadership to deliver State House by following through on its tough negotiating stance. Any substantive retreat at the Annan table, as is normal in all such processes, will only lead to the militias acting ever more independently of their putative leaders.

THE DIMINUTION IN THE ability of the Raila and Kibaki camps to drive events on the ground is matched by their reduced prestige and support in the international arena. Already, 10 Members of Parliament from both parties may be barred from visiting the United States. This falling off in legitimacy has disturbing and far more important local implications.

Legitimacy is the lifeblood of successful civilian control of the armed forces. The current split threatens to give birth to opposed nations, all fighting over control of the resources and mantle of the state. The inability of the security forces to act against the violent forces tearing the nation apart undermines the positions of both Kibaki and Raila.

The more their teams are doubted, questioned and censured abroad, the more tarnished they become in the eyes of the Kenyan soldier. There is a further erosion of their authority if violence continues to be unleashed by militias in the name of ethnic solidarity.

This will only deepen the existing chasms within the ranks so that soldiers increasingly react to the chain of command in similar fashion as their civilian counterparts. In this part of the world, a divided force of well-trained and equipped men and women leads logically to a Pandora’s Box.

TO PEER INTO IT IS TO SEE security personnel both aiding and abetting ethnic cleansing or so paralysed as to cede their mandate to protect to hyper-violent militias. Either possibility means the Kibaki and Raila camps will find it difficult if not impossible to forge a settlement that is comprehensive enough to isolate the violent militias in Rift Valley and Nairobi. For the political status quo on which the two camps depend to survive, there must be unity among the personnel of all the security agencies.

That unity will only come if the leadership of all the branches of the security forces (and even organs such as the National Security Advisory Committee) become a part of the ongoing negotiations. Junior security personnel must be convinced that the chain of command is diverse and inclusive enough to keep them focused on their professional duties and not on their ethnic affiliations with embattled and bitter civilians. This is a more modest but critical goal of the Kofi Annan mediation process compared with a settlement that is Solomonic enough to please all sides.

IT IS HIGH TIME THAT THE Kibaki administration and ODM understood that militias and a divided security force are a threat to them both. They should not believe that the violence will automatically stop because they have come to an agreement, since reaching it involves making fundamental compromises that largely go against the grain of their core supporters’ sentiments. Rather the violence, which has now travelled far past the scope of the anger at the election results, will only cease once it becomes clear that Kenya’s security personnel can act effectively irrespective of their ethnic and political differences.

Reaching an agreement that strengthens the civilian command and control will take the worst case scenario — soldiers turning against each other violently or supporting militia campaigns — off the table.

This aspect of the agreement can be hammered out separately and quickly so that it effectively buys time to fashion a more lasting and widely supported dispensation.

Escape to Accra

Accra is my new favorite place. Got here yesterday morning and instantly fell in love with the place. The warmth, the openness, the constant positive references to Africa, it’s too much so now I must find some way to spend more time here. On Thursday evening I went from the airport in Nairobi to a dinner in the course of which a mad plot was hatched to get up the next morning and go to Jomo Kenyatta Airport and buy a ticket to Accra. In the last 48 hours I have been to Johannesburg, Nairobi and now Accra. Verdict? Accra is so much easier to enjoy and the people – seriously and not just to throw around cliches – are just so friendly and open to outsiders – very different from my experience down South and of course in the ‘new’ Kenya. More stuff coming up on this visit if only as an interlude from the bleak posts on Kenya that have dominated lately.

Generation Fire

(This post originally run in the February 3, 2008 issue of The East African.)

Watching television news the other day, I was struck by how many of the pictures of the rioting youth showed them apparently in good cheer. This despite the anger in the country about the presidential election results, at the lack of economic opportunities and at the violence being meted out by both rioters and the security forces.

When the cameras roll they capture among the perpetrators of violence is one of euphoria and carnival despite the suffering and destruction that the country has experienced in the past month.

They were rolling recently when a group of young men stopped a car, forced out the driver, and stripped it of whatever was easily carried before setting it aflame.

They laughed and celebrated, holding their machetes and clubs aloft, a few pranced around the car’s burning hulk. In another scene, a crowd, again mostly of young men, uprooted a section of a railway track. Others chased children from school and burned down government offices.

These young men, especially the ones in spontaneously formed groups as opposed to well-organised ones, are in the grip of a moment of intense fellow feeling. They are experiencing euphoria at their shattering of moral and material boundaries.

Power, the power to destroy what seemed so unassailable, so permanent, they are increasingly realising, is like a drug that you need in ever greater supply. The burning and the maiming, and especially the increasing instances of rape when combined with the pictures of euphoric expression combine to suggest that some of the country’s youth are part of a gruesome festival that can potentially engulf ever larger parts of the country.

These bands of young men on television are like young men everywhere in the world and, throughout history, who have been caught in the periodic joining of political rage and the licence to transcend normal social limits. They are unmaking their world.

THE BURNING OF SHOPS AND homes, the destruction of transport infrastructure and government property and the taking of life, is not chaos as so many of us term it. Rather it is the flipside of order.

Their destruction overturns, if only momentarily, the normal order of the Kenyan universe. However, as many of their elders would like to believe, their violent actions do not eject them from Kenyan society. Rather, they are an intimate yet alienated part of it that has decided for the moment to defy the normal laws and morals of their upbringing.

To transgress a boundary you must first believe in its existence and its importance. Burning chiefs’ houses and destroying infrastructure paradoxically confirms how important these are to their destroyers.

By trying to unmake the hold of the law on themselves, they are confirming its policing of the bounds of a society that they now believe deserves rupturing and remaking.

If the high politics practised by elected leaders does not address past injustices and does not heed the anger and alienation of the young, then it will be replaced by the politics of the street. This is a politics of fire that seeks to destroy all in a desperate and very rarely successful attempt to justly remake society and re-establish its shattered moral bounds.

Why are there so many fires? The obvious and correct answer is that they are being started to send a message to politicians and their supporters about the widespread opposition to the election results — or support in some areas.

A more speculative answer is that they are a kind of political pyromania, a fundamental rhythm that dictates the life of euphoric violence; and they will only increase the more the political realm continues to withhold a good reason to return to the status quo.

I am saying here that violence and war have their own logic, which is not shared by those who set them in motion.

The violence may have its architects or patrons and those who benefit from it in the tit-for-tat of politics, but it owes to none of them its intimate rhythms, its joys and excesses. The mistake is age-old: leaders believing that they can switch the rage of their supporters on and off at will. But if they ever had any control of the situation, then this is power that is growing more distant by the day.

The reason such atrocities as we have suffered in Kenya are possible is that the perpetrators believe that they are engaged in just actions. The anger at the election results has morphed into a state of festival: a period when normal laws and habits are suspended.

This feeling of living in a world or a time outside society’s normal bounds accounts for the euphoria experienced by the youth around those bonfires and riots. According to them, they are quite literally destroying their world in order to save it.

If there is a lesson in all this to the political elites, it is that if Kenya’s morals and laws excuse injustice for too long, as is the case with our history, then there will come occasions when enough people will feel the need for a radical change.

If this happens outside the normal political space, due, for example, to a failed election, then all that is needed is for a spark to allow for a violent reaction.

Too often, Kenya’s political analysts and writers insist on believing that politics is a secular affair governed only by material means and ends.

Yet even as they believe that about politics, the rest of their lives are suffused with belief in the transcendent.

We go to church on Sundays and intersperse our day with prayer. But politics too is a realm of charismatic belief. Our politicians understand this intuitively. Their promises are akin to promises to be Moses leading their constituents to the Promised Land.

POLITICS IS A REALM THAT STRA-ins toward the transcendent, which is to say it periodically makes a dash toward its boundaries and retains the potential to breach them. These young men in the Rift Valley, Central Province and elsewhere destroying and causing so much suffering, are exploring moral spaces beyond the frontiers that have up to now governed their everyday lives.

The longer the political impasse continues, the more the society they left behind will seem less real than the violent and unjust one they are creating.

There is still time to douse the fires and stop the deaths. The leaders whom Kenyan citizens have given the responsibility to police the precincts of this moral community we call the Kenyan nation have failed more often than they have succeeded.

If they do not stand tall for once, or move aside for those who can, then politics will indeed move from the halls of government to the streets.

For now, the young men causing so much suffering still believe in the existence and importance of the boundaries they have violated. They believe that violence will lead to a new season that speaks to their aspirations and hopes.

They are mistaken. All around Kenya are examples of countries that have fed on the flames and now need decades to recover what they built so laboriously.

It is a simple choice for those who are in positions of political and adult responsibility: either move decisively to enthrone just rule and a political and economic system that is broadly believed to be fair or face the flames that will pulverise Kenya and leave nothing standing but the memory of your failed leadership.

Regional Interests and Kenyan Stability

With all respect to the Kofi Annan mediation effort, perhaps it is time that the region’s leaders visited Nairobi as a group and insisted on some movement toward a political settlement. In the same way that the Lusaka and Arusha peace agreements, aimed at Congo and Burundi respectively, were crafted from tough negotiations led by the region, Kenya too should follow this path. The difference being that the region has very real interests in a stable Kenya and that it has leverage against both sides. How much longer for instance can Rwanda and Uganda seat on the sidelines and watch as a major trading and investment partner – not to mention a thoroughfare for their imports and exports – go up in flames?

Kenyans peering at their belly buttons – fiddling while the place burns

I am going crazy. I am blogging seating at a table with a small group of Kenyans here in Johannesburg. One of them is visiting from Nairobi and he is filled with the smug knowingness that characterises our country’s elite and is the biggest reason why the flames are up and may stay up for much longer. I am so sick of this Kenyan feeling that the normal laws of violent conflict somehow do not apply to us because we are different. We are special and peaceful. That the guy burning and killing just wants to fill his belly and will soon calm down. What nonsense and what really is it going to take for us to get it through our heads that our country is disintegrating while we fiddle around and believe that it is 300 shs cocktails as usual.

Trying to explain Kenyan trouble in Swedish

For those of you who understand Swedish and want to hear some Kenyan ranting on Sveriges Radio, please go to the Konflikt page and tell me what it is being said other than the parts in English. Same applies to this much shorter interview also in Swedish.

Kenya still burning

Have pasted in four opinion pieces below that have run in the East African and elsewhere in the last month. Trying to restart blogging but my brain feels leaden and uncooperative.

Generation Disaster

This opinion originally run in the East Africa on January 28, 2008 under the title,

‘The problem with Kenya’s politics is the old guard‘

The next revolution in Kenya will not be a violent one, contrary to the bloodletting presently underway. Rather it will be the rejection of the generation of men from whom the leaders of this country have been drawn.

The major politicians were in politics long before the majority of Kenyans were even born and who even today enjoy inordinate sway in the country. President Mwai Kibaki was born in 1931. Ex-president Daniel arap Moi was born in 1924.

They are still doddering on, unable to relinquish the reins of the power they have held onto tightly for half a century.

Theirs is a generation steeped in tribal arithmetic, in a cynical nationalism; their values have infected those thousands of young people who are roaming the countryside in a killing frenzy.

The young men throwing stones and shooting arrows and the youthful riot policemen opposite them lobbing tear gas and firing live ammunition are fodder for the failed politics of a generation of old men who may just take all of us to the grave with them.

I was raised to respect my elders and there are many whom I indeed respect. But the time has come to assess in the broadest and most personal terms how the generation of leaders that took this country from independence to the bloody and dangerous present has performed.

The oldest were born in the 1920s and the youngest of the lot in the 1940s — opposition leader Raila Odinga, who was born in 1945 is the youth wing of this generation. They can be counted as a single generation in the sense that their vision of what constitutes Kenya and their role in it is widely shared.

This generation has played and continues to play a prominent role in politics, in our intellectual life and in the business community.

While there are many among them who are capable and well intentioned, the defining characteristic of this generation is failure in leadership.

It is not enough to lay the blame on a few individuals. These prominent wazee (old men) have defined for us the content of our politics and the ethics of governance. They are our very own Boomer Generation except that the boom in this instance is the sound of our dreams and aspirations exploding. It is time we named them Generation Disaster.

It is a popular pastime to compare Kenya’s performance in economic and human development terms with that of the Asian Tigers such as South Korea and Malaysia. How often I have heard it said that these countries in economic terms were neck and neck with Kenya in the 1970s, only for them to surge ahead in the past three decades while Kenya trod water and in many instances retreated on the advances it had made.

The approximately 3 per cent of Kenyans who are above the age of 65 and from whom the bulk of Generation Disaster is drawn, have led us to an average life expectancy of 55 years compared with South Korea’s 77 and Malaysia’s 72 — according to the online Institute World Guide, which allows country comparison of economic data.

The economic numbers are even more dire. Kenya’s gross domestic product of $38 billion as of 2005 is only a fraction of Malaysia’s $287 billion and South Korea’s $1 trillion. Per capita, Kenyan citizens have only 12 per cent of their Malaysian counterparts’ income and 6 per cent of the South Korean GDP per capita of almost $23,000. At the turn of the century, 40 per cent of Kenyans were unofficially unemployed compared with fewer than 4 per cent of Malaysians and South Koreans.

These statistics, we can suppose with reasonable confidence, have deteriorated in the past three weeks and they mean that Kenya can count itself first among equals only if compared to the Congos and Guineas of this world. Our leaders’ vision is only to be lauded if compared with countries that have experienced genocides and decades-long civil wars.

Yet this generation, which touts its anti-colonialist credentials, its Kennedy Airlifts (the US scholarship programmes of the 1960s), its Makerere (university) pedigree and its ambassador-at-30 mentality has only managed to take us from one disaster to the next.

I grew up hearing about the inferiority of one tribe as against the other, in jokes that now seem like macabre warnings of a day when they would become deadly serious. My elders were ever focused on their belly buttons. Not for them to learn from the experiences of other countries — especially the disasters that were unfolding around us and sending refugees by the thousands into our country.

Their language was a curious construction. “The Kikuyu are now in power,” they would say even though I hardly saw a penny from this so-called power. “The Kalenjin have taken power,” they complained as President Moi stepped into State House, “They will finish us now for sure.” “The Luos can never rule this country; the Kikuyus are thieves; the Luhyas don’t know how to take power…”

This language is what has given birth to the present crisis and has underpinned the governance of this country since Independence.

Such a leap into the illogical, for our generation of leaders, is the very basis of logical thinking when it comes to apportioning power and privilege among themselves. It has served them well, this spokesman-of-the-tribe role.

It is the position that has enabled all those Mercedes Benzes to be bought from the proceeds of Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing and the dozens of financial schemes to rob the Treasury in the name of fulfilling the privileges of tribal mandarin.

Though they developed these roles before the majority of us were even born, their thinking has infected us all. Say what you will about the opposition, it too is a gathering of “spokesmen of the tribe” challenging a government largely constituted from similar material.

The one thing that such politics will not deliver to this country is the kind of vision and leadership that led South Korea and Malaysia from poverty to wealth. We may continue chasing “those people” from one area or the other and supporting the powerful on the basis that they are “our people,” but perhaps we only need to remember that the cost in lives is borne by individuals.

What does it matter that there is a Kikuyu president when you are a Kikuyu living in Nairobi’s Mathare slum? This generation of wazee has infected the country with its self-serving obsession with ethnicity as politics and politics as ethnicity. It has lived longer than most Kenyans can expect to live and yet it refuses to exit the stage.

Generation Disaster has repeatedly turned down opportunities to appeal to our better natures. It has chosen advancement from enmity rather than from strengthening our bonds.

Fear and suspicion are its stock in trade. These wazee sap on the blood of the young and seek gratification of their lust for power even if it leads to the destruction of this fragile, injured thing we call Kenya.

Why exactly should we respect this generation that has lived longer than most of us can expect to live and yet refuses to exit the stage, like an ill-mannered guest who insists on staying an extra night?

Kenya can avoid years of civil strife by sharing power

Kenya can avoid years of civil strife by sharing power

(This editorial originally run in the East African on January 21, 2008)

There is no great mystery about what the future has in store for Kenya.

Other nations, too, have trodden the path of contested electoral outcomes, the formation of winner-takes-all governments, mass protests, mass violence, civil war and their breaking and shattering before they are put back together laboriously.

Still others have shied away from the abyss after an initial period of bloodletting similar to the one that has been experienced in Kenya during the past three weeks. They have been blessed with wise statesmanship and have embraced reforms that enable power sharing, empower their citizens to emerge from poverty and embrace a politics that promotes cohesion as opposed to discord.

Kenya’s choices are simple: life or death, penury or prosperity, a cohesive, well-governed nation that counts its diversity as strength or a suspicious, hateful one governed by the cynical and awash in the blood of its young. The leaders too must now decide whether they will be remembered as the men and women who destroyed a nation or as those who rescued it and set it on a glorious path that will be remembered for generations.

Raila Odinga has a right to call for peaceful mass protests. If that right keeps being denied, we cannot continue to consider our country a democracy. But the opposition should not assume that it has enough of a national mandate to force the government out through extra-constitutional measures or to try and use violence by its alleged supporters as a stratagem to force the government’s hand.

Unfortunately, Raila Odinga, who promised the country transformative leadership, must begin leading before he occupies State House. President Kibaki can choose to govern a country that is unravelling or bring about reconciliation by pushing for genuine power-sharing measures that will allow for the gains of Vision 2030 to be his permanent legacy. Other countries have been at a similar crossroads.

In December 1980, Uganda held its first presidential elections. Milton Obote was declared the winner of a poll that international observers monitored and declared to be far from free or fair. A losing aspirant by the name Yoweri Museveni, refusing to accept the decision, led 27 men into the bush to wage a bloody six-year guerrilla war that brought him to power, where he remains more than two decades later.

The government of Milton Obote, on its way to defeat, killed over 300,000 Ugandans. Kenya looked on, refugees crossed its borders, and many Kenyan children were taught by Ugandan teachers on the run from a country that had become the bone over which men of outstanding viciousness and cynicism fought.

Lesson to Kenya: Beware those thwarted by the ballot and refused the right to organise peacefully, come to believe that the only course of action open to them is the bullet. This may not be decided by the opposition of the day but perhaps by one of the millions of now-unknown Kenyans who feel left out of the process of governing. Perhaps we should learn also that power-sharing is national survival and not merely a procedural choice.

For three decades after independence, Ivory Coast was the Kenya of West Africa. It was ruled over by the authoritarian Felix Houphouet-Boigny, but nevertheless distinguished itself for generally harmonious relations between its ethnic and religious groups, and its strong economy.

In the mid-1990s, this island of calm turned away from cohesion and openness to destructive difference, as Henri Conan Bedie, Houphouet-Boigny’s successor, turned to a policy known as Ivoirité to maintain his tenuous grip on political power.

Ivoirité initially referred to the country’s common cultural identity, but in the cut and thrust of politics came to exclude many northerners whose origins were in neighbouring countries but who had acquired citizenship. What followed was a period of coups, cancelled elections, rigged Supreme Court decisions, bloody riots in Abidjan targeting “foreigners” and a decisive turn toward the politics of difference.

This unfortunate period culminated in a mutiny in 2002 carried out by soldiers of northern origin. It escalated into a full-scale civil war whose main bone of contention was how the definition of a citizen affected who could hope to govern the country.

The fighting lasted five years and cost many lives as well as bringing that formerly vibrant economy to its knees. The northerners’ exclusion from government led them to lose hope in politics as an arena that they could usefully participate in; they concluded that the best course for them was to attempt to topple the system that had judged them ineligible.

Last year, the conflict appeared at an end when President Laurent Gbagbo signed a power-sharing agreement with Guillaume Soro, the rebel commander.

Lesson to Kenya: Power sharing will be the way of governing whether we wait to fight a civil war to realise that point or enact it immediately and render it as law in a new constitution. Neither Gbagbo nor Soro or any of the other leaders in Ivory Coast had the support of the majority — just like the situation in Kenya today — which ultimately meant that they did not have the mandate to force their version of government on the entire nation.

A further lesson is that discrimination, whether in the form of Ivoirité or in the Kenyan version of cobbling together alliances to exclude one tribe or the other from the table of government very rarely delivers a lasting political victory. It should also be noted that armies and police forces reflect the feelings and identities of their fellow citizens. To promote the politics of difference risks ultimately splitting the security forces, with disastrous consequences that are visible throughout the continent.

South Africa, even as it came out of decades of the brutal apartheid system, had the benefit of having leaders of vision and courage. Rather than push for a “winner-takes-all” system, Nelson Mandela and the ANC, which could have secured the two-thirds parliamentary majority to force any constitutional changes it wished, instead chose to form a government of national unity. This government included the Nationalist Party that had championed apartheid and the mostly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party whose supporters had fought a brutal low-intensity war against the ANC’s supporters in Kwazulu-Natal.

That Mandela and his colleagues could share power with those who had detained them and brutalised millions of their fellow countrymen is a testament to their profound understanding that the path of governing alone would lead them to further misery rather than a healing democracy.

Today, South Africa remains mired in the legacy of apartheid but there are few in that country who believe as they did in the mid-1990s that the country will come apart at the seams and degenerate into a widespread civil war between its internal nations.

Surely, if Nelson Mandela could share power with the Nationalist Party, then it is not too much to expect President Kibaki and Raila Odinga to do the same. It is not their individual ambitions that should now concern Kenyans. Rather, citizens must now push to overhaul the brutal machine inherited from the colonialists, designed as it is to maintain the power and privilege of the few by turning us against each other.

It is up to Raila Odinga to show Kenyans that he will not stand by as Kenya disintegrates, that the love of country that distinguished his years of struggling for democracy and enduring detention and torture will rise to the fore. He must allay fears, however unfounded, that many in the Mt Kenya region have of him as a leader, and he must castigate violence with feeling and conviction.

For the rest of us Kenyans, we must rally to a Citizen’s Agenda that rejects leaders who do not bring about a closure to the election either by a re-tallying or a re-election after an appropriate length of time. We must agitate for a government of national unity to deliver us a new constitution that improves mechanisms for the transfer of power, enables the equitable regional distribution of state resources and trims the powers of the executive.

We must demand the restoration of the lives of the displaced, and their rehabilitation and reconstruction. We must act on past injustices in the allocation and ownership of land while acknowledging that not to deal with these matters will forever threaten our peace.

Finally and most importantly, Kenyans must teach politicians that they are leaders to serve and not be served, and that we shall reject them should they appear to take positions that bring our country to ruin.

A country created by grand theft, ruled by a clique

A country created by grand theft, ruled by a clique

(Originally printed in the East African on January 14, 2008)

Robbery has thrived in Kenya for many decades now. The very creation of Kenya a century ago was an act of grand theft. Our country won its independence but has never broken free from the idea that political power is a license to rob by means fair or foul.

For decades as colonial subjects we were not allowed to vote freely. When we finally won the right to vote, most of the subsequent elections were stolen from us. The 2007 poll thus found a people rooted in a history whose course, twisted by the machinations of brutal thefts and shady backroom deals, had meted out injustice and indignity to more people than it enriched or empowered.

Yet Kenyans, despite this chequered history, had in the years since the early 1990s become bigger than their circumstances. They had begun believing that they could indeed change their country for the better. The ballot had become, despite the best attempts of their erstwhile leaders, a way to impose their will on a political elite whose most prominent members had been part of the old boy’s club that ruled with an iron fist for decades.

The election results, when they were announced by Samuel Kivuitu, the formerly much-respected chairman of the Election Commission of Kenya, rather than appearing to express the will of a large section of the electorate, seemed to many to be one more act of robbery. Others who had rallied around President Mwai Kibaki, who was now quickly sworn in to a second term, felt that justice had been done. Yet Kenya in 2007 is not the Kenya of 1987.

Young men who felt that their vote had been rigged turned on their neighbours who they believed had been supporters of the president’s Party of National Unity. They thought that they had been witness to an act of robbery that released all their latent resentment over other perceived past injustices.

They burnt down houses, they beat many and killed some, they looted and destroyed shops — most belonging to Gikuyus who as a bloc had been solidly behind the president.

Machetes swung, rapes happened, a church containing dozens of people seeking safety within its premises was torched, cars were burnt, and roadblocks manned by angry, bribe-demanding young men peppered roads across the Rift Valley province.

Now you hear it said boldly, no longer whispered as it was before the election, that ethnic cleansing or even genocide is underway. Senior members of the government have publicly stated that they have evidence that the attacks were planned by people associated with the opposition.

The truth of these claims or their counter-claims will become apparent with time. But the allegation alone, coming as it does in an atmosphere of rumour, innuendo and conspiracy theory is a danger to the country.

If there is a repetitive pattern to mass violence through history, it is that victimisers usually begin as the victimised or at least perceive themselves as such. We should beware our fears because they can turn us into monsters. This is especially true among those with a great deal of power, since their fear can lead to a worse conflagration than any we have witnessed so far.

Returning to the young men who have burnt and killed in the Rift Valley and elsewhere in the belief that they were acting to right the wrongs of stolen lands, ethnic chauvinism, government neglect and a rigged election, their acts of violence, rather than bringing them closer to gaining justice, have only driven them to join the great Kenyan tradition of robbing and dispossessing the perceived enemy. They have raised a mighty fear in the moneyed classes, especially in Nairobi.

What do you own in the elite neighbourhoods of Kileleshwa and Lavington when violence erupts in Kibera’s slums? The large screen television remains in its usual spot, except that this time it is reporting fire and death in Nairobi and not the Gaza Strip. Cars stay in their driveways.

The bank vaults holding the billions of shillings that the government had proudly proclaimed were the creation of its policies stay unopened for the days while Kenya burns. The expensive paintings in Nairobi’s luxurious malls are seen by no one and the imported designer clothes remain undisturbed on their hangers.

The only things that spread are fear and rage. They fill all spaces. The violence is dispossession by remote control. The political and economic elite that had celebrated the steady rise of the Nairobi Stock Exchange Index, which marched alongside their fortunes, cower and wonder whether their security guards will protect them or join the rage coming through the radio and television.

Paranoia rules. Streams of refugees leave the Rift Valley and Kisumu and Mathare and Kibera. Violence is a form of language, one that speaks the world into two camps: the merchants of violence and their victims. The results of the election were being invoked as a reason by the rioters but their point went deeper.

They were screaming to the world that they too could rob and take as so much has been taken from them; they were rendering the objects of power and privilege impotent. They succeeded for some days before a lull set in. But the anger and frustration remain present.

Those young men are watching for the backroom deal. They have their eyes focused on men and women in suits meeting in secret places and whispering secret things and agreeing on how to keep that Nairobi Stock Exchange Index continuing its happy rise to the heavens.

They see a lot more than the politicians believe they do and now that they have had a taste of the paralysing power of violence, they will man their powder kegs waiting for the betrayal that has always issued out of the backrooms where power has been cobbled together and distributed among a very small group of people.

Yet because the rich and powerful, especially those who are in possession of the reins of state, have been scared by the violence, they may become even less partial to sharing power.

It would do well to heed the fire, for it has only been damped down for the moment.

It will not go out at the orders of government spokesmen. Rather, real peace will only come from acknowledging our history of betrayal and robbery and heeding citizens’ demands that a fundamental change be made in the way the country is governed.

Ethnic strife: How Kenya’s politics was tribalised

This piece appeared in the East African in the second week of January 7, 2008 as Kenya continued to burn.

Ethnic strife: How Kenya’s politics was tribalised

It is Friday, December January 4. I walk through the lobby of the Serena Hotel in Nairobi. Packs of politicians and their entourages hurry past. Most have mobile phones into which they whisper urgently. They brush shoulders with white men and women lugging large cameras, trying to arrange for taxis to take them to the nearest scene of carnage and bloodletting. I get the impression that the more the politicians whisper into their phones, the more images the international press will capture.

Kenya at the moment must look to those watching CNN or BBC what Zimbabwe or Nepal looked like to me in the past. But then I know that the country is not in the grip of atavistic hatreds, images of machete-wielding, church burning men notwithstanding. This is a political crisis fuelled by ethnic differences that in Kenya are now, as never before, political differences.

Growing up, tribal stereotypes were the source of much shared humour among friends and family. Difference was funny. But underneath the jokes, in the same way that we say that there is no smoke without fire, was the recognition that our differences, no matter the friendly way we tossed them out, were actual and lasting.

In the 2007 campaign season for parliamentary and presidential seats, what had previously been jokes morphed into paranoid and even hateful mobile text messages. The intention was to drive the country into tribal camps from which votes for the particular candidates would issue.

I am a Gikuyu like President Kibaki and therefore expected to automatically be ready to vote along these lines. In many political conversations that I had with relatives, the opponent increasingly was not only the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) as a political party but rather the Luo tribe of Raila Odinga.

The opposition’s intention (many Gikuyus believed) was not only to win the election and lead with different ideas and policies but rather its aim was to destroy the country and us along with it. I was told that we were in a fight to the last, that the winner would take all and damn the loser. The opposition too was driven by similar ethnic mathematics even though the trend – which was confirmed in the 2005 constitutional referendum – was of the rest of the tribes aligning themselves against a perceived Gikuyu determination to hold onto power at all costs.

Three years ago, I interviewed a woman who was imprisoned in Rwanda for participating in the 1994 genocide. She has remained vivid in my memory for a curious remark she made when I asked her how far back the genocide’s planning started.

“The war,” she said, “started when I was a little girl in the 1970s and other children would tease me for having Tutsi legs?” Two decades later, the length and thickness of your legs determined who died and who lived at a roadblock. Imagine for an instant one of those children that did the jeering and teasing, now an adult with machete in hand faced by an ID-less girl with long, thin legs.

To the men huddled around the poolside tables at the Serena Hotel, political parties are not expressions of ideological or policy differences. Instead, political leaders are in a fight to our death for a politics they envision as a system of spoils.

This fight to get a larger slice of the “cake” has been growing in divisiveness and hateful rhetoric. We are like infants drawn to touch a flame or driven by a horrid fascination with what lies beyond the cliff’s edge, curious perhaps to test the limits of our peace after decades of tut-tutting at the many wars in our neighbourhood.

Kenyans for the past few years have worn tribal lens when looking at the political landscape. In this decoding by many of my fellow Gikuyu, ODM is perceived as an existential foe, not just an electoral one.

To be anti-Kibaki, or at least opposed to him, as was the case with a majority of the country’s provinces and at least 45 per cent of the voters, was going to be regarded by many Party of National Unity supporters, particularly those from the Mount Kenya communities, as inimical to their existence and survival as a collective.

A similar sense of drastic opposition applied to many ODM supporters. The stage was set for the violence seen across the country during the past week.

In politics, perception is reality. And the reality of politics, its fundamental meaning, at those rare moments when it enjoys the greatest clarity to the greatest numbers, is that it is a pitched contest between friends and enemies.

Many Kenyans have chosen their friends and enemies on the basis of tribal loyalty and identification. Beyond the much-repeated admonitions against such politics, let me suggest that we have dipped our toes into dangerous waters. That politics will fundamentally continue to be the struggle between friend and enemies and will not cease.

This is a struggle that is subject to the principle of escalation. One side’s paranoia is matched by that of the other side, one rumour with another, and text messages are sent out which appear to mirror each other in the claims of victimhood and outrage.

This escalation, which is already much in evidence, holds out the frightening possibility of a “war of all against all.” If indeed politics is friends versus foes, then how we define who are our friends and who our enemies are, is of the essence. This is the abyss into which the country is staring.

The campaign period turned the ethnic map into a political one. The individual Kenyan, despite his membership of and loyalty to different identities is now more strictly enfolded (perhaps imprisoned is a better word) in a single tribal collective that owes loyalty to those within – no matter their crimes or failings.

Its character is oppositional, its language that of the victim. Societies that have become engulfed in political violence rarely get much warning. The lead-up to conflagration is characterised by the political rhetoric of reasonableness on all sides when they speak into the larger public space.

But in their asides and coded messages to “their side,” foaming-at-the-mouth, hateful messages are uttered to secure the vote. Suspicion and rumours of fantastical conspiracies have been all the rage in the past year of campaigning.

A pamphlet that was found in Rwanda immediately after the 1994 genocide had this to say about how to motivate Hutus to loath their Tutsi neighbours and countrymen:

“Never underestimate the strength of the enemy, and never overestimate the intelligence of the target audience. Strive in your language to identify the enemy with everything feared and loathed. Lies, exaggeration, ridicule, innuendo — all ably serve the ultimate aim of winning over the undecided, sowing confusion and division among the opposed. And this freedom from the confines of truth opens up a powerful technique for sowing fear and hatred: ‘accusation in a mirror.’”

Accusation in a mirror. This is Kenya’s leading political tactic. Accuse the other side of rigging the vote while you do just that. Accuse the other of intending to rob the treasury while you do just that or prepare to have that very privilege on ascending to office.

Both sides pronounce themselves victim and the cynical acts of manipulation they utilise are framed to look like reactions to the “enemy.” Across the Rift Valley, in Kisumu and Nairobi, young men are roaming machetes in hand to finally destroy the enemy.

What many of these young men do not know is that the Serena Hotel and similar founts of privilege and wealth are the home of the very political class that has defined the friend and the enemy in Rift Valley and Central Kenya.

On Thursday last week, as people who had tried to assemble for the opposition rally in Uhuru Park were chased back and forth by the police, just beyond the Serena’s fence, I was seated next to groups of politicians who were certainly not ethnically cleansing each other off their sodas and croissants.

They were muttering into their mobile phones the messages that were driving those young men across the country to violence on behalf of a political class that is willing to sacrifice our lives on the altar of their lust for power and privilege.

Kenya is burning

Everyone reading this blog must know that Kenya is aflame. We have burnt churches with dozens trapped in them, we have seen a peaceful election with the highest turnout in our history end as farce and the number of displaced citizens has risen to more than 100,000. I wrote a piece last October that I hate reading and that I did not believe a few days after writing it. Too pessimistic I thought. Take a look at it and let me know what you think:
http://bulletsandhoney.wordpress.com/2006/10/10/kenyas-coming-fire/

Will be back with more.

Chilling in Djibouti

I just got back from Djibouti and the amazing Palace Kempinsky. It is a beautiful behemoth of a hotel with almost no guests: courtesy of it having being built for the recent COMESA Heads of State Summit and with very few other conceivable reasons for existing. But then before I get into that let me welcome myself back to this blog which I have left for more than a year. The strange thing is that whether I am blogging or not, it gets approximately the same number of visitors. So here is to the end of 2007, a year that has to rank as one of my better ones. I feel like it was the year that I awoke from a sort of reverie, an illusion so grand and long lasting that I had assumed it to be normal run-of-the-mill life.

In the past twelve months I have done my usual frantic running around the Horn of Africa, To Dubai, India, to different parts of Europe (including Rome for the first time where I quite inexplicably wept like a child in St. Peter’s Basilica) and to Algeria. It was fun but there is something about constant travel when you do not truly have a place to call home, a safe port to which you are called, that has a sad aspect. There was nothing to really stop me from saying that I could leave Addis and settle in any of the cities that I visited. So much freedom felt somehow constricting. Don’t ask me, I can’t figure it out either. Here comes 2008. How did it ever come to be 2008? What’s the bloody rush?

Anyway, here are some pictures of Djibouti. I just recently purchased a point-and-click to at least try and preserve some of what I see to permanent memory. I used to dislike the idea of taking pictures instead of looking at what was in front of me. It felt somehow like a greed to possess, like those kids who will save little scraps of unfinished food under the pillow. Anyway, away with all that. Just tried to upload some photos and do not have a clue how to do it.

Bullets & Honey Closed…

Just got back to Addis with a bag of 2007 resolutions, one which is to temporarily close down African Bullets & Honey for a few months. Yes, I am running a stake through the heart of this monster until I can find more time to dedicate to it.

If you feel like taking over it for six months, then just write to me at bulletsandhoney at googlemail.com so that we can get something sorted.

If you have never been to Lamu on the Kenyan coast, then pack your bags and head there. I spent a week in this most beautiful of coastal towns alongside writers and editors attending the Kwani Literary Festival. Things were smoked, others drank and a 24-hour dhow trip to Pate Island made. I came back from a week of not even bothering to read a newspaper to find that Ethiopia had chased the Islamic Courts out of Mogadishu and that Saddam Hussein had been executed in a particularly thuggish manner. So much to blog about but alas…

Next on the menu for this son of the soil is my very first visit to Dubai and India next week and then a few days in South Africa. Of course as all this is happening, I will be struggling to finish my thesis. After all the happy procrastination, I now have exactly nine months to get it done and submitted. So some sacrifices have to be made; one of them – happily for me – is the ravenous, inconsiderate and always hungry for more Bullets & Honey.

Thanks for visiting.

Dr. De Cock Praises The Cut

Who would have guessed that the good Dr. Kevin M. De Cock, director of H.I.V./AIDS for the World Health Organization, would have been so presciently named? A study in Kenya and Uganda by the National Institutes of Health has found evidence that circumcision might reduce a man’s risk of contracting HIV from heterosexual sex by as much as fifty percent. Dr. De Cock reckons that men should not now assume that their circumcised penis has become a kind of magic bullet which they can shove around willy-nilly. Rather, it is, he says, “… a potentially important intervention.” Alas, his caution is correct.

The very same New York Times now trumpeting The Cut some years ago reported another study whose conclusion was quite the opposite. This one after studying almost the same number of men in the US as this more recent one studied in Kenya and Uganda, found that circumcision not only does not lead to lower rates of STDs but that their incidence is actually higher among the circumcised. Quite mysteriously, it also found that circumcised men were much likelier to engage in, to quote the NYT, ‘a varied repertoire of sexual practices, including oral sex, anal sex and masturbation.’ I wonder what Dr. De Cock has to say about all this and perhaps less pertinently, but more interestingly, whether he is circumcised or not.

To digress slightly: what kind of teasing was poor De Cock subjected to in school? I can just hear the jeering chorus, “De Cock, the Cock, De Cock, the Cock…” It must have been hell for the boy, and I am deeply ashamed that I should find it so funny at my age.

Anyway, hard on the heels of the pro-circumcision study, two of the larger HIV/AIDS funds are considering paying for The Cut in high-risk countries. Daniel Halperin, a Harvard HIV specialist extraordinaire, excitedly responded, “I have no doubt that as word of this gets around, millions of African men will want to get circumcised, and that will save many lives.” That is the kind of enthusiasm displayed by a man who got The Cut as an infant in a bright shiny hospital. Not as a teenager by a circumciser who declared the use of anesthetic to be unmanly as yours truly lay trouser-less, sweating onto the cold plastic of the hospital cot and praying to the gods for a last minute reprieve and failing that at least an injection of painkiller.

I really could not have guessed that my being tricked into the little Kiambu clinic was in fact a considerate attempt on the part of my father and uncle to reduce the number of Langerhans cells I had and thus potentially save me from future HIV infection. Yes, I was tricked, deceived, lied to, bamboozled, led astray, run amuck.

I had just completed my Certificate of Primary Education exams and found my dear father waiting in his car, a big smile on his face. “Would you like to go to town for an after-exam treat at Wimpy and then go visit your granddad’s clinic?” he asked, hugging me to him. A few hours and pints of blood later, I was a man.

Perhaps a twelve-year old man who had briefly fainted from blood loss, but a man nevertheless – and it should be noted that I took the procedure with nary a sound (this is a very important fact, perhaps the most important of all to those of you unused to male pride in enduring pain for no great purpose.) I was finally free of those troublesome Langerhans that had up to then called the underside of my foreskin home. I wish Dr. De Cock had been around then so that the procedure was paid for by American money, in a clinic that insisted on the use of anesthetic and kept me far from the trickery of my father who to this day chuckles every time we drive by the stone and corrugated iron building that used to house my late grandfather’s clinic.

Jamhuri Day Party in Addis Ababa

Last night I attended the Jamhuri Day party at the Kenyan Embassy in Addis Ababa, an event which is on every diplomat’s and Ethiopian taxi driver’s calendar. There were at least five hundred people who attended and the food and the tusker were in full flow. So much so that I heard myself, as if from afar, roaring all manner of greetings to people that I knew. ‘Welcome to Kenya,’ I would find myself shouting repeatedly to every Ethiopian acquaintance or friend who attended the event. I steered them this way and that, pointed out the banana trees and asked, ‘do you like those Kenyan banana trees? how about this Kenyan building? And Kenyan food, do you like the food? Isn’t the music lovely? Hey how about that ambassador? Coolest diplomat in town right?

It went on this way, fuelled by the generous portions of tusker that I was pouring into myself, and I fear that I was probably the most fearful bore of the party. I was having fun though and I think in some way I was revenging for being made to answer all the foreigner/ferenji questions that come at me on a daily basis. For instance, not a day or two pass without my being asked whether I like injera. Now the answer, and not just for the sake of politeness, is yes. But this question, I think, is really not about injera but about what I, a foreigner, think of this country. There is no option to say no because if there is one thing that some months of being here have taught me is that non-Ethiopians walk on egg-shells around Ethiopian pride. It’s all good though. Pride is good. I guess.

Anyway, back to the party. A young Kenyan who I suspect is a student at the university sauntered up to the bar and stood alongside me. He had short dreadlocks, and had a dark sweater with green, yellow and red stripes worn over a squat, powerful frame. He was very drunk as became apparent when he slurringly and quite belligerently ordered the bartender to pour him a drink. But the bar, he was told, was closed even though the bartender was busy serving me and others – who were all to a man in ties unlike this young revolutionary. He did not take it lying down: ‘Pour me a fucking drink,’ he shouted. The drink, gin, was poured with him insisting that it be filled to the brim. Once it was in his hand, he dashed it to the ground and screamed, screamed is the exact word, ‘to Dedan Kimathi!’

The bartender, a peaceable man till just then shouted back, ‘why you pour drink? Who is this Kimathi?’ Their back and fro, full of outraged explanations by the student and complete confusion on the bartender’s part, entertained me for a full fifteen minutes before we all staggered away to dance to Lingala.

A couple of hours later, this young Dedan Kimathi was spotted fast asleep on embassy grounds. One of the Kenyan diplomats took the opportunity to deliver a lecture on the importance of handling your liquor well – met by slow nods from Kenyans in the circle who were too drunk to do more than mutter guilty agreement. But this group of inebriates came alive in protest when the diplomat made to wake the young man up and kick him out. ‘He is in Kenya,’ ‘how can you kick him out of his own house?’ These and similar remarks came fast and furious so that the diplomat eventually backed down, probably having decided to do the kicking out more discreetly. But the incident seemed to me to speak to a certain, increasing Kenyan ownership of our spaces, and an unwillingness to accept the official point of view. Or am I romanticizing and over-interpreting a small, meaningless incident?

Lamu Calling

Word is out, the ticket is in hand, the speedo packed and the aspirin counted, I am going to The Kwani Literary Festival in Lamu from December 21st to 28th. What could be better than surf and sand and books and people who love them?

Lamu from the tourist brochures is described as ‘hypnotically exotic’ where ‘life slows down, and long days are spent strolling along the waterfront, exploring the town or relaxing on the beaches.’ Of course people also live there and that is what really gets me, how enticed I am by the touristy descriptions of my own country. How is it that my tastes have converged so much with the Africa as Consumable sector that sees Kenya as nothing more than a giant game park that happens to have a few, corrupt, ‘underdeveloped’ people living in it?

These are the kind of questions that I shall ask as I lie on the beach with cocktail in hand. There is nothing better than angst in the midst of plenty.

Solidarity Journalism and Venezuela

Phil Gunson in opendemocracy.net on how the ‘political polarisation of Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela is reproduced in the way the phenomenon is reported and assessed’. More on the defects of “solidarity journalism”.

The article kind of reminds me of the media reporting on Zimbabwe and Mugabe which often leaves me with the sense that there are only two possible positions to take: being pro-Mugabe or pro-white settler.

Charm kills art and I fear it has murdered in Addis Ababa

I was recently rewatching Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited when a friend of mine, who is on a one-year writing fellowship in London asked whether he should move house to Oxford so that he could commute to London for his classes. Oxford, which is a city that I enjoy and like, is ever associated in my mind with charm. As in walking its cobblestones always yields the thought of how charming it is. Yet this I suspect is not what Oxford is at all, its charm is a velvet glove worn over a monstrous self regard which like all malign things that are English is hidden by a facade of good manners and prettified surface.

In any case, here is what the character Anthony Blanche says to Charles Ryder, a modestly famous artist of famous country houses played by Jeremy Irons: “I warned you. I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”

This charm is what I have been seeing in many of the galleries I have visited here in Addis Ababa. The artists seem captive to a desire to please and delight, and little more, so that canvas after canvas, all somehow avoiding the world the artist lives in, become like a giant lie that soothes so that it can sell. Charm, in addition to being a facet of personality, is a magic with dangerous, hypnotic qualities. Who would want to hypnotize if not for the purpose of some sort of harm? Charm as magic in the hands of the pleaser and delighter, the artist who avoids honesty, who steers clear of controversy at all costs, recruits him into society’s ruling army of dissemblers. In fact the dictator is more honest in his manipulations and betrayals than is the artist who paints little cute flowers as tanks roll by in the streets.

It was not until I met Richard Onyango (old NYT review) in Nairobi this past weekend that I was able to recognize what I had been seeing in so many galleries here. Onyango’s art is the practice of honesty and it shines through. His life with Souzy Drosie is captured in all its pain and frustration and happiness. His painting of a KBS bus evoked in me such a powerful memory of a day in which death missed me by an inch and ploughed its tons of metal into a schoolboy who was standing less than two meters from me. Onyango does not charm, he delights and challenges and makes me feel that I must be more honest in my writing, and yes, to be a bit dramatic, in my living as well.

(Btw, here is another great quote from the Brideshead Revisited series. This time by Father Mowbray: “But yesterday I got a real eye opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.”)

Bring Back the American Draft

The question of whether we need a universal military draft will be important as long as this country is placing thousands of young men and women in harm’s way in Iraq. As long as Americans are being shipped off to war, then everyone should be vulnerable, not just those who, because of economic circumstances, are attracted by lucrative enlistment bonuses and educational says Charles Rangel, the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee from New York. You can read more here.

The draft is a logical extension of democracy. If a nation is deciding on whether to wage war or not, one of the questions its citizens should have to ask is whether they are ready to step in harm’s way for the aims that their government is pursuing. The war in Iraq for instance is being fought by young people from the poorest backgrounds, many who signed on just because they did not have other economic options, while almost none of their leaders in the White House and Congress have experienced war or even have children in uniform. In fact a large number actively avoided the Vietnam draft and got off by being connected to the high and mighty.

I have so often railed against the state, especially the Kenyan one, on this blog but there is something about this posture that can sometimes be a bit false, particularly if it is in wartime. Let me stay with the United States for a minute. In the most general terms, both the Left and the Right of that country regard their politics to be in some way opposed to the state even as they fight for the right to possess and direct it. Both sides are after all arguably different strains of classical liberalism with its clarion call of individual rights not only pre-existing the state but taking precedence over it.

From the Left comes the rebellion against The Man who is supposed to support the military or use it to not only dominate and control society – the playground of the (vulnerable) progressive individual with his inalienable rights – but also to embark on a violent imperialism abroad. The Right also fights The Man who it supposes to be a be-suited bureaucrat determined to bring the economy – the playground of the profit-maximizing individual to whom private property is virtue – under his malign control. Both sides regard the state warily and want it cut down to size when it does not serve them. The hunger for power by these two broad groupings is ever present, and is really at the heart of their critiques against the state. If you were a Martian and heard either side rail about the evils of state-power, as I have done so often myself, you would think that the state is run by robots or is a very big animal with a will totally disconnected from the politics of the day.

Yet the government, if democracy exists in America, is created and maintained by the interaction between these camps. The government to put it more simply is the people. If it wages war, so do they. So why should the poorest among them, eighteen year olds from trailer parks who sign on to get a college education and a job, have to be shredded by IUDs while the rest sit back and snipe at each other over the actions of the government from their safe seats?

It does not matter that an individual American did not support the war personally; celebrating his country as a democracy means that he implicitly has to own the actions of the present government. Military service and the draft are an extension of democratic citizenship and not to be understood as an extension of Left or Right politics, or for whom you cast your vote, or the anger or delight you feel as news of the war carries to you.

But in politics as in life nothing is so clear-cut. I suspect that my reasoning opens a Pandora’s Box. If indeed the government is the people in a democracy – take or give some problems here or there – then it might make logical sense for civilians to be violently attacked by forces opposed to that nation’s policies. The more robust and realized a democracy is, the thinner gets the boundaries between citizen, military and government. Thus it would make perfect, if heinous and cruel, sense to attack the citizen of a democratic country because you are opposed to his government’s actions.

Craftsman Versus World

Matthew Crawford writing in The New Atlantis on why I should have paid more attention in wood- and metal-work class.

In the age of think tanks, consulting firms, and IKEA, craftsmanship seems to be in decline. Shop class is becoming rarer, and our children are told that college is the ticket to an “open future” as a “knowledge worker.” This rejection of craftsmanship wrongly ignores the cognitive, social, and remunerative rewards of skilled manual work, and wrongly assumes that white-collar work always engages the mind.

excerpt:

Because craftsmanship refers to objective standards that do not issue from the self and its desires, it poses a challenge to the ethic of consumerism, as the sociologist Richard Sennett has recently argued. The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new. The craftsman is then more possessive, more tied to what is present, the dead incarnation of past labor; the consumer is more free, more imaginative, and so more valorous according to those who would sell us things. Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some independence from the manipulations of marketing, which typically divert attention from what a thing is to a back-story intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands. Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to plausibly imagine it, renders the social narrative of the advertisement less potent. The tradesman has an impoverished fantasy life compared to the ideal consumer; he is more utilitarian and less given to soaring hopes. But he is also more autonomous.

This would seem to be significant for any political typology. Political theorists from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson have questioned the republican virtue of the mechanic, finding him too narrow in his concerns to be moved by the public good. Yet this assessment was made before the full flowering of mass communication and mass conformity, which pose a different set of problems for the republican character: enervation of judgment and erosion of the independent spirit. Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political. The craftsman’s habitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the distinction between the Right Way and the Wrong Way. However narrow in its application, this is a rare appearance in contemporary life—a disinterested, articulable, and publicly affirmable idea of the good. Such a strong ontology is somewhat at odds with the cutting-edge institutions of the new capitalism, and with the educational regime that aims to supply those institutions with suitable workers—pliable generalists unfettered by any single set of skills.

The rest of the essay can be found here.

Fernando Botero and Abu Ghraib

Fernando Botero is showing his incredible new paintings of the Abu Ghraib torture scenes at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. You can see more of them at Slate.com

Hornsleth: Danish Artist and Ugandan Village

I have just stumbled into Mr. Kristian von Hornsleth, intrepid Danish artist known for audacious works such as the Fuck Me Daddy Bikini and his generally dark view of the art world and art lovers (see his poem, ‘FUCK YOU ART LOVERS.’)

Now his war against global capitalism and consumerism (take a look at his Fuck You Art Lovers dildo) has moved to Buteyongera in Mukono district, a small village north of Kampala, Uganda. The project was to give 108 villagers pigs and other farm animals if they agreed to legally add Hornsleth to their name. Each of the villagers has now been issued a national Uganda ID card showing their new Hornsleth name and their photos holding this ID are to be works of art exhibited around the world.

In five years, the plan is to paid five thousand villagers to become Hornsleths. (Read more here) A Ugandan colleague tells me that newspapers in Uganda and government officials have lambasted the show – calling it a neo-colonial plot – while the new Hornsleths, in possession of their newfound animal wealth, have been largely supportive.

All I can do is laugh. This is the funniest art project that I have come across since I tried making one in my high school art class and failed miserably. Kristian von Hornsleth cannot be satirised, he is already satire. I actually think that this project is doing exactly what art is meant to do which is to provoke.

Kristian’s intention ‘to show in his work the dirty way of global capitalism and confront it with the humane and ethic thinking of his art.’ The work’s ‘political meaning’ as his website puts it is to highlight the depredations and manipulations that Africa suffers at the hands of global capital. But its real thorn, the real controversy is in the willingness of the villagers to change their names and the reactions by their leaders. As the website expresses it, the new Hornsleths are so removed from the world of (Danish/international?) art that their profiting by taking on the name of a ‘worldwide famous artist’ is so ‘abstract for them that they neglect the implications.’

Predictably from the rafters of the Ugandan politician came the howl of condemnation, the singed racial pride, the invocation of anti-imperialism. From the villagers will be silence and emails like this one quoted enthusiastically on Hornsleth.com

‘hello Hornsleth,
you havedone a wonderfull job in Mukono district and am from wakiso district from a vertain village called Nkowe. But can you please do some helping in my village so that we can be rescured out of poverty that my people are facing now. I am a student of makerere university doing a Bachelors Degree in development studies.
Roger M___’

The email says it all assuming that it is a real email actually sent by this Roger whose representations are truthful. The development student at the national university, as hopelessly addicted to donor monies as so much of Uganda seems to be – ready to prostrate himself in whatever fashion in return for ‘development’ which is the result of an externally driven, handout based process. The ‘fight against poverty’ such a constant refrain, the poverty itself so biting and unrelieved by hope from any other direction other than government and donor.

While Roger thus pleads, his State Minister for Ethics and Integrity, Dr James Nsaba Buturo comes from the other end of the spectrum with a dose of national pride. Or at least that is what he believes it to be: “The government cannot allow such a project to continue. This man owns a cult and he is a homosexual. His agenda is not good for the country. He uses obscene language and has no respect and kind words for God. As soon as he arrives in the country, police will catch up with him to investigate his activities,” he says. This happens just a few days before he is cited by the press for misappropriating government funds. Yes that’s right, the minister of ethics and integrity accused of stealing government funds. (Makes you wonder what documents are on his desk: in the in-tray lies and theft while the out-tray carries truth and virtue?)

The comedy, because you have to laugh not to cry, becomes even more hysterical when you consider that this same minister who would have the project closed down serves a government that receives over fifty percent of its budget from countries like Denmark where Kristian von Hornsleth hails from.

So the circus wheel turns. Hornsleth who thinks he is exposing global capital is instead revealing a lot more than that, more than the ‘ignorance’ of the villagers to the art world. He is actually drawing the lid on the painful contradictions on Ugandan/African nationhood, the absurdities buried in our ideas of citizenship and development and leadership.

More could be said on this subject and in fact it will but first I must consider yet another of Kristian von Hornsleth’s worthy projects, namely Futilism. As in the Futilistic Society which is based on the manifesto that this philosopher, artist and architect has written. Hornsleth has declared war on ‘boredom, routine, institutions and traditions’ and this is a struggle that will be waged so that its result, hopefully when you the bored reader have taken in the ‘blinding clarity and a hazy overload’ of his words, will be to reach into chaos and darkness and away from what is meaningless and futile.

Isn’t it all quite wonderful?

Change of Subject and Trip to Asia

I suspect that there is a saboteur out to get bullets and honey; in the last week paragraphs have disappeared from the blog and I just now had a techie friend fix the problem (with embarrasing ease.) Maybe this is what I get for dipping my toes into Kenya’s treacherous tribal wars, in which case I must get away. And by that I mean that I am planning to visit Asia for the very first time.

Yes, this son of the soil is going to get into one of those machines made by man to visit at least a couple of cities in India and possibly one in China. I will be there for a week or two at the most so I suspect that I will not have the chance to see much. But planning and thinking of the trip has brought me low in shame. China has a billion people and I do not have a single close friend that I can call there. How pathetic is that? India is the same with all the Indians I know in the States or in Kenya so that again I do not have a person to call on anywhere on that sub-continent (except for the folks I will be working with for a few days.)

For this reason, I have lately been trying to chat up my Indian neighbors in the hope of some introductions with very little success – they just nod politely and keep walking. Yesterday afternoon I saw a piece of paper on the ground and picked it up only to find that it was a letter in english with some Hindi writing (I assume); I guess it must have been dropped by one of them or blown over from their place. Curiosity got the better of me and so I read it. The only exceptional item was the question whether the recipient had ‘managed to make any new negro friends…’ The thing is that I have been re-reading my James Baldwin lately and so this word negro has been much on my mind but I had no idea that there were still people using it to this day. Is it a bad thing? What does it mean? Assuming that the letter belonged to my neighbors, I really think I should befriend them – maybe all their words are frozen in 1960s ‘jive-turkey’ Americanisms.

If I do get to make this trip, I will be the second person in my close family to have been in Asia. My grandfather fought with the King’s African Rifles in Burma. Well, he didn’t really fight since he was a medic (and therefore was called doctor by everyone in Sigona, Kiambu till he passed away) but he was over there.

Most Kenyans do not know with what tenacity and success our grandfathers fought in that campaign since our relentlessly nationalist reading of history leaves no space to acknowledge Africans who fought for the British against the Japanese or the Germans. What this means in my own life is that I grew up around men who had traveled the world, maybe had even performed great feats in battle and never got to hear about it. I wish I had known what I know now before he died. So many memories in my family seem to just be buried and forgotten. And yet daily I read accounts of other peoples who have fought this or that campaign, who have traveled across that sea or that desert, while not having a single idea whether my own blood ever had the same experiences. It is crazy shit to live in a continent that is the most ancient – the cradle of mankind no less – and not know anything much about my own grandfather’s life. I won’t even get into the fact that I have never heard more than a few words about his father and mother, or theirs.

In the States, my black American friends would occasionally remark on how wonderful it was that I ‘had a history’ and a ‘name’ when theirs had been stolen from them by history. How to explain that in the most personal terms, they could trace their lineages further back than I could mine. That they could pop into courthouses and libraries and come away with records and stories of their grandparent’s parents when I could barely name mine or even tell where they had lived, what they had done. It is as my friend Wambui says, I live in an ancient world without having a history. How to explain to them that I may not have a “slave name” but that I do not really know the meaning of my name. It was handed to me from my grandfather as he received it from his grandfather but I was never told what it meant, where it came from, why for heaven’s sake our naming system was as it is. And please do not tell me of pyramids and the great Kush, they are as remote to me in personal terms as the Han Dynasty or ancient Greece. Of course I feel some nationalist pride once in a while at the thought of the Swahili trading empire or even Nubia and Egypt but I have no a personal sense of linkage with that time and those people because my history looms up short – maybe eighty to a hundred years at the most.
I wonder what this does to me. Am I freed by not being bound by a past, freer to create my life, to imagine different courses? Or am I like a corkscrew in a raging ocean, without direction, without the foundations of history on which to build my life? Hell, are these questions even relevant anymore?

Kenya’s Coming Fire?

I grew up being told that Luos were clever but addicted to showboating; Kambas were clean but stupid; the Maasai brutal and backward; people from the Coast were lazy; while we Gikuyus were ambitious and a tad dishonest. In a Kenya where the president’s marital wars impact national politics more than his economic policy, it is not strange that the personal becomes the political. The jokes I heard at home have now become phone texts whose intention is to drive us into tribal camps pitted against each other. The enemy increasingly is not ODM as a political party – it is the Luo, the non-Gikuyu. The opposition’s intention (many Gikuyus are starting to believe) is not to win an election and lead with different ideas and policies; no the aim is to destroy the country and us along with it. It is a fight to the last, the winner takes all and everyone else is damned. As a mugikuyu, I think it’s important for our country to have a Gikuyu political grouping that vocally refuses to merely toe the tribal line. It is not that the opposition leadership is not driven by similar ethnic mathematics, but rather that the trend – seen in the 2005 referendum – is of the rest of the country aligning against a perceived Gikuyu determination to hold onto power at all costs. This is going to hurt Gikuyus not to mention the country in the long term, possibly violently. The bigger the segment of Kenyans willing to give their support to candidates for non-tribal reasons, the closer we will be to a peaceful, strong democracy.

Recent mobile text: “Nari Koruo Kibaki arendia nyamu ici cia ruguru (meera) nakuu Thailand. Tutiguo tutari ona imwe. kana tugiciheane ouguo tuhu? Ukuuga atia weemundu wa Mumbi?” (If only Kibaki was selling these Luo animals to Thailand (like the elephants that the Kenya Wildlife Service controversially wanted to sell to zoos abroad) Or should we just give them away for free? What do you say child of Mumbi?)

Delivered with a laugh and a wink just as it was when I was a child.

Two years ago, I interviewed a woman who was imprisoned in Rwanda for having participated in the 1994 genocide. She has remained vivid in my memory for a curious remark she made when I asked her how far back the genocide’s planning started. “The war,” she said, “started when I was a little girl in the 1970s and other children would tease me for having Tutsi legs…” Two decades later, the length and thickness of your legs marked who died at many a roadblock. Imagine for an instant one of those children that did the jeering and teasing, now an adult with machete in hand faced by an ID-less girl with long, thin legs.

Kenyans have been toying with the flames of hatred for decades now, imagining ourselves to be immune to the violence that has engulfed our region since independence. “We are special, Kenyans are just different,” said a friend of mine last night as we shared a beer, “we can never become like Rwanda or Uganda, we like peace too much.” I thought that she might have forgotten to pick up the Sunday Standard to read stories of tribal clashes in Rift Valley and Laikipia. But she does know of them, but prefers to remain a fully paid up member to Kenya’s national amnesia and head in the sand approach to the consequences of our politics. Like the people of Ivory Coast thought they were different when looking to the Biafras and the Liberias rejecting outright that they too were vulnerable to the same logic until they plunged into a massive civil war.

Let us be honest and acknowledge that our political parties are not expressions of ideological or policy differences. Instead the leaders of ODM and Narc-Kenya are in a fight to the death for a politics they envision as a system of spoils.

This fight to get a larger slice of the ‘cake’ has been growing in divisiveness and hateful rhetoric. We are like infants drawn to touch a flame or driven by a horrid fascination with what lies beyond the cliff’s edge, curious perhaps to test the limits of our peace after decades of tut-tutting at the many wars in our neighborhood. Past clashes at the Coast and the Rift Valley are our version of dipping our toes into hot water to test its temperature. But beware the push from behind by our politicians who would have us dive in if it protected their positions. We may (thank God) not become a Rwanda but we can easily create a country balkanized along tribal lines. Where a Gikuyu cannot peacefully live in the Rift Valley or a Kamba work in Kisumu and a Luo settle in Mombasa.

The December 2007 elections approach after three years of intense campaigning and politicking. President Kibaki has dropped in and out of public view; the Cabinet has been reshuffled; high-level resignations and firings for corruption have occurred; a constitutional referendum has come and gone; while political alliances have been dissolved and elsewhere reconstituted. The lightning and thunder of these events has been directed by the elite’s simple calculation of tribal alliance. On the one side is the Narc-Kenya camp which identifies itself – and is identified by many Kenyans – as pro-Gikuyu. Its public utterances are aimed at winning next year’s elections against the leaders of the Orange Democratic Movement. Kenyans know that what is said by politicians in newspapers and on television, and which a non-Kenyan might imagine to be news, is actually then re-interpreted by most of us to fit tribal frames. It is in this decoding that ODM is increasingly perceived by many Gikuyus to be an existential foe, not just an electoral one. To be anti-Kibaki, if we keep to our present path, is going to be regarded by Narc-Kenya’s supporters as inimical to their existence and survival as a collective: the first step toward violence.

In politics perception is reality. And the reality of politics, its fundamental meaning, at those rare moments when it enjoys the greatest clarity to the greatest numbers, is that it is the contest between friends and enemies. Many Kenyans, especially the Gikuyu middle class to whom this letter is directed have chosen their friends and enemies on the basis of tribal loyalty and identification. Beyond the much repeated admonitions against such politics, I want to suggest that we have dipped our toes into dangerous waters. It is not that the rest of Kenya is not tribalistic or that the higher reaches of ODM are in anyway driven more by the national interest than are Kibaki and company. My point is that the regime in power for better or worse is tying its fortunes to the fluid but popular identity of ugikuyu and betting that it can remain in power in our name. That politics will continue to be the struggle between friend and enemies will never cease to be the case. That this struggle is subject to the principle of escalation, when one side enmity and its resulting actions is intensified by the others, and holding out the perpetual possibility of a ‘war of all against all’ is also unavoidable if we accept that politics is the battle ground against enemies. How we define who are our friends is therefore the determinant to the shape of the struggles to come and the constitution of the armies that will march.

Since our independence, and arguably prior to it, Kenyans have only rarely experienced the high ground of politics when the enemy stands out in stark relief. Our nationalist writing of history suggests that this is what the Mau Mau war represented but then we all know despite our history curriculum that in reality the rebellion was never an act arising from a national consensus. In fact the nationalization of the Mau Mau has not allowed a national sharing of rights and privilege, but rather has rendered invisible other anti-colonial movements that existed, and served as a shield to the powers that have placed themselves at the head of the nationalist line against democratic opposition. But we do have national moments, when Kenyans feel themselves to be part of a nation, and these for us who do not shirk from the notion of politics as enmity are clearly to be identified in moments when the opposition is in view. We feel Kenyan watching the Olympics five thousand meter final and seeing the Ethiopians trying to surge ahead of our compatriots. In a similar way, we felt Kenyan during the 2002 election period by identifying the enemy as Moi’s mercenary regime and its attempt to survive its term limit. We united against its narrow tribalisms, its cynical henchmen and its attempt during the 1990s to rob us of all hope and saddle us with corruption as a permanent state of being. That precious moment of nation-hood, which we all recall with nostalgia, is now only alive in the fleeting moments when we watch a race or the Harambee Stars. It has been swamped by the struggle against tribal enemies.

The private jokes about un-ambitious Luos and admonitions against an overly ambitious Raila Odinga are the symbolic roots of a growing public chasm between us Gikuyus and other Kenyans that is being actualized in the conduct of this ‘Gikuyu’ government. Those jokes and stereotyped opinions function to enlarge the tribal space while shrinking all the other identities (marriage, church, profession, neighborhood, economic class etc) that Kenyans share. The individual despite his membership of and loyalty to different groupings is coming to be strictly enfolded (perhaps imprisoned is a better word) in a single tribal collective, ugikuyu, that owes loyalty to those within – no matter their crimes or failings. Its character is oppositional to ODM, its language that of the victim so that it in not unusual to hear prosperous and powerful relatives of mine refer to the Gikuyu as victims of a political process that seeks to destroy us or consign us to the dark margins. At some point, as the electoral battle heats up, it is possible that this feeling of victimhood will escalate beyond the outcome of polls or the chance to ‘eat the cake,’ and into a perception of physical threat: that an ODM government would kill Gikuyus. It is here that the real danger lies. Yet the inevitable outbreaks of violence in political rallies in the coming year will be identified by many a subtle demagogue as evidence that a victory for ODM is tantamount to a clarion call for anti-Gikuyu violence.

Societies that have become engulfed in political violence rarely get much warning. This is because its lead-up is characterized by the political rhetoric of reasonableness. Prolonged political conflagration is far less the province of the foaming-at-the-mouth ideologue, the hater, it is to be found among the ‘reasonable.’ The Kibaki government and its supporters dress in the robes of order and reason. In this tribalized atmosphere, they charge their opponents with being the armies of disorder and unreasonableness. It is us versus them, and no other political ground to stand on is identified as viable. We are reasonable, they are unreasonable. Since we are for good schools, Kibaki, safe streets, prosperity, honesty and ugikuyu, they can only stand for failing schools, insecurity, Raila, Luo power and dishonesty.

I occasionally ask Gikuyu supporters of this regime to describe to me what they mean by order. They identify it with the reigning in of law-breaking matatus, the campaign to beautify Nairobi (by painting buildings, sweeping streets and planting flowers on roundabouts) and the destruction of slums, ugly kiosks and the aggressive pursuit of squatters. Order in other words is a paintbrush and a rungu. It did not strike a close relative of mine that it was unreasonable for squatters in a Nairobi slum be given ten minutes warning before their shacks were bulldozed and razed to the ground by thugs hired by the landowner and acting with the assistance of the police. We speak the language of reasonableness knowing full well that its actualization is unreasonably violent and unjust. But politics is not shooting fish in the barrel, the bulldozer and the askari’s rungu carrying forth our Gikuyu version of order will not always be met with entreaties and tears. The enemy too is subject to the law of violent escalation and will with time gain the will to resist, which in turn will drive the regime to send in even more bulldozers and bigger rungus. The Gikuyu middle class’ uncritical identification of its interests with those of the Kibaki regime will only make it seem that those rungus are wielded by us rather than by a narrow group of people who want to hide among us while pursuing their own selfish ends.

Hopefully I am wrong about the turn to violence that our present politics will lead us to. But consider again, for a moment, what the politics of either-or lead to. While we take possession of reasonableness and order, refusing to believe that other Kenyans are also driven by similar desires, we will eventually conclude that the only way to hold to these hopes is to bring others – those ‘beasts of the west’ – have to be brought to order. And this as I have mentioned before, by virtue of the shape and history of our state, which retains all its colonial trappings and tendencies, will be a recipe for our supporting violence and the disenfranchisement of our ‘enemy.’

The propaganda to come will go beyond humorous abuse to sinister whispers of what Raila and others have planned for Gikuyus should they win. A pamphlet that was found in Rwanda immediately after the 1994 genocide had this to say about how to motivate Hutus to loath their Tutsi neighbors and countrymen:

Never underestimate the strength of the enemy, and never overestimate the intelligence of the target audience. Strive in your language to identify the enemy with everything feared and loathed. Lies, exaggeration, ridicule, innuendo—all ably serve the ultimate aim of winning over the undecided, sowing confusion and division among the opposed. And this freedom from the confines of truth opens up a powerful technique for sowing fear and hatred: ‘accusation in a mirror.’

Accusation in a mirror. Remember this tactic: what we are told about the motives of ODM and Raila will often be exactly what the Gikuyu xenophobes have planned for others. That way, they will continue to present themselves as (potential) victims and the most cynical acts of manipulation and even violence that they initiate will be framed to seem as reactions to the ‘enemy.’

I do not want to end on such a pessimistic note, and I pray that I am wrong in believing that a nation cannot play with hatred and tribal division without being plunged into some degree of violence. And no, I do not think that we are on the way to becoming a Rwanda or a Congo. But I do know that one week of tribal clashes in Nairobi is all it will take to forever change our country for the worse.

I am proud of my family’s entrepreneurial courage, my being raised to be ambitious and forward looking but I recognize that these are not exclusive Gikuyu traits. I love one-man guitar; feel a twinge when I hear Kenny Rogers; and have acquired a great hunger to own land of my own. But I have lived in Nairobi and elsewhere long enough, among many people from other parts of the country and the world to know that I share these interests with others who were not born in the shadow of Mt. Kenya. A failure to take this into consideration in the coming year, by joining ranks with a supposed Gikuyu regime will only ensure that I am not true to my life. And that I will betray the ideals of flexibility and open-mindedness that my Gikuyu mother brought me up with and that have allowed me to thrive in Nairobi and abroad by being open to others with whom I share so much.

The Gikuyu Debate Hots Up!

I thought I would take comments from Binyavanga’s open letter to his father and post them as a debate. Between Binyavanga and ‘Uncle Joe’ on the issue of Gikuyu tribal chauvanism as reflected in the actions of the Kibaki government. This argument really cuts to the heart of a debate that Gikuyus of the younger generation should be having right now. For more on this take a look at the section to the right on Home and Nation…

JOE said…

Dear Wainaina,

I am sorry that at the age of 35 we have to talk about this issue. But it seems you have a few things mixed up .First let me correct you. You are a kikuyu first and a Kenyan second. Long before the colonial government formed Kenya you were a kikuyu and long after the united states of Africa forms you will still be a kikuyu.

Son we have brought you up to be a sceptical ,thinking person like you have indicated ,believing in solid institution and building them but my dear son let me remind you that when you build a house you have to begin with the foundation, a strong tree can not grow without strong roots. You foundation as a strong African begin by being a strong Kenyan, and your being a strong Kenyan begins with being a strong mgikuyu.

My dear son do not be an apologetic for who you are. Do not be ashamed of your blood and your heritage. Son sometimes in life people will blame for their own laziness and inability to adopt to the modern world .Do not think that because you are able to cope and survive that you should take the blame for their failures.

My son! Sometimes member of our own community will act foolishly but that should not worry you .after all every market has its mad man. It doesn’t mean that the whole village is mad .so dear Wainaina do not over react to the situation at hand .like every other cloud it too shall come to pass. Long before it was Kenya vs. us we defeated the British, before that countless others. So don’t worry .Only remember it is said Nyumba ya Gikuyu and Mumbi igikajeta—nigeteka!

Your loving uncle
Uncle Joe

Binyavanga said…

Dear Uncle Joe,

Ah. Thank you for your wise words! For, honestly, until you told me, I had no idea what I was first or second.

I am enlightened and positively provoked by your contribution: it is wonderful to discover that I was a Kikuyu even before I was born; it is even more useful to discover from you that I am a Kikuyu because other people are lazy; and I am a Kikuyu first because you say so – and because you know me so well.

Now I know!

Some people may view your statement as xenophobic – but, wink, wink, we all know better don’t we -you have spoken deep truths and I am not confused at all.

By the way, Uncle Joe, by name is Binyavanga. A Gikuyu name too, uncle, as it came to me through our naming system.

It would be good if you would use it.

I will do as you ask and say nothing about all the madmen in the village who are robbing Kenya and Kikuyus blind. For we must close ranks and protect them – madmen are our people too!

Can you help me join the new government to contribute positively to my FirstKikuyuness?

Do I need to take an oath?

Joe said…

Dear Wainaina

And I insist on calling you Wainaina. I am glad you received my letter in good faith. I am also glad that your letter provoked the commentary it has.

Son yes it is in did true that the village mad man is our mad man and when a choice has to be made between our village mad man and the other villages mad men, I think I would rather support our mad man. Until other constructive villagers in our village or the other village come up. I am sorry to say I trust our mad man. You see my son that is the very problem we face a lark of choice. Given two bad choices then we have no other option but to choose the one we can relate to at some level.

As pointed out in one of the comments I am glad that you respect my choice to be a kikuyu first and a Kenyan second. They are both who I am and that does not mean I devalue the number two. I take great pride in both and I am sure you will find it in your heart to do the same .My son you can be a proud kikuyu and a proud Kenyan, the two are not mutually exclusive as some would like to insist .

Now my son since you last reply I too have been doing a lot of thinking your letter spoke volumes and I hope this correspondence can continue. On the issue of the oath. You don’t need to worry about that. When you were born you were automatically oathed remember I said ‘Nyumba ya Gikuyu and Mumbi igikajeta—nigeteka!’ maybe your raising this issue is your call to that oath

Your loving uncle

Uncle Joe

Binyavanga said…

Dear Joe, well, by using the name Wainaina, you are actually referring to my elder brother; and my grandfather – if you want to talk to them, feel free. Wainaina is a name associated with my family, but not a name used to address me: culturally or in any other way. If you want to know – it would have been great if you had the courtesy to ask first – for people often have good reasons for their names – now and a thousand years ago – I am Binyavanga wa Muigai.

Brittle things crack and break, they crack and break. Maybe this is why there are so many wa Wanjirus these days – the failure by the uncles to give dynamic answers to what are becoming complex issues.

Who froze things to make them so rigid – where did this mobile and flexible force – fast growing dynamic and welcoming go – for this pure blood so spoken about by some these days, welcomed, in those very old days so many other bloods, and ideas and dynamism.

And we inherited brittle men – unable to cope with the times and stewing in dissatisfaction and drink – and repeating mantras, refusing to participate in family, and leaving the dynamism to the women who filled the shoes.

Ahh!

But a man need not explain himself. And a generation who failed us need not account.

But we must listen?

Why can the uncles and fathers see they have lost their sons?

Uncle Joe said…

Binyavanga Wainaina, I am glad you true colours have come out. ODM Supporter. Clearly your loyalty is to ODM and not Kenya. If it was you would explain to us what a clean and none tribal Narc did for three years when the rest of your gang was in power. Is it only after they were kicked out of Government that the government became tribal. I am sorry to say you are fighting a battle you will not win. I suggest you get used to this program and get used to it well. Trying to demonize leaders wont help sure you want a change in Kenya we all want a change but what are you suggesting that we replace Kibaki, Karume and Michuki for Raila, Ojode and Otieno Kajwang. Come on get serious.

In fact there is no need to continuing arguing or discussing this issue now that your true colours have come out. Let the people decide. you continue your propaganda, but come December 2007 we shall settle this mess once and for all.

Binyavanga said…

Hi all. I am quite surprised at how strongly I feel about all this. Actually, for the past few weeks, I have been going around telling people we need to “normalize” the conversation around issues in Kenya, saying that I can’t listen to shrillness any more

So please forgive my shrill entry.

Certainly there are many identity and power issues in Kenya – and yes, I agree with Anonymous that these become ominous when allied to National politics – and what are, in effect, National Warlords – whose relationship with their “constituencies” is one where they are the biggest threat to violence and the potential providers of government violence when necessary to “save” their constituents from the “others”.

Their motive is not “patriotism” – Kibaki and Michuki are not interested in the “upliftment of all Gikuyus” – nor is Koigi any more, or all that clique.

It is Koigi who has led the takeover of KBC by a group of Gikuyu xenophobes.

Their fundamental objective is to create an environment where they, their families their class (composed of all the relatives of all the warlords who are in business together, and their suppliers, contacts, tender- (isers) and so on) keep feeding the Nation with bones while they are eating the nice meat and flesh, exporting the skin, hooves and head.

They care for us, certainly, they are human you know – just like you may care a lot for the fat dog you hug, brush, and feed your leftovers.

This political culture, invented by the Kenyatta clique is at war with a new generation who find it harder and harder to believe that “our man in the house” will feed us all.

And surrounding and threatening all civil order is a generation so cynical, so removed from hope – they either take what they find rummaging around Kenya’s dustbins of possibilities, or create little mafias to strong-arm in places where the long arm of Michuki types don’t care to control.

So all attempts to clear hawkers and plant flowers simply sends crime underground. The biggest joke is: Westlands market has never been expanded – or new markets built. Gikomba, which turns over tens of millions everyday is still as it was. Wakulima market which handles all of Nairobi’s fresh produce – and also turns over tens of millions everyday. All these cannot be expanded. But flowers are planted. So – no room is made for the informal sector to “formalize its business – but it is this in formal economy that has provided most of the jobs in Kimunya’s budget- and it is this economy that is by faaaaar the largest investor and growth machine in Kenya.

The best signifier of the cynicism of this government is Dandora. More young men have been killed by the police in Dandora during Kibaki’s govt than through all of Moi’s years. A young man who looks “cool” and is “confident” is a “suspect”.

Further, the dumpsite is has grown fourfold since 2002 – as Ukoo Flani put it: Safisha Nairobi, Chafua Dandora. There is no policy to deal with it, now it is spilling into a primary school. So the cleaning of Nairobi has nothing to do with creating a well-run city. It is to do with moving the dirt to the people who a guy like Michuki has utter contempt for…

Hawkers have never been given any useful facilities – though they pay millions in fees to City Council – so real “trade” and “investment” – according to Kibaki’s government is Multinationals and titanium and export processing zones – these, we are told will make us rich.

To me it seems that wealth will come to us if that guy who has managed, with no loan, no premises, no toilet – to build world class furniture on the side of the road – the giving room and credit and encouragement to that guy – that is where we industrialize.

That is where all the toy makers from Taiwan came from.

Joe Wanjui – the most comical character of all the comic characters of the Kenyatta mafia generation has been running around saying he is a multi-millionaire because he worked hard and has ambitions (this he tells Nairobi University students). He told a friend who interviewed him that all he (my friend) needs to do is go to a bank and ask for money and build an empire.

Kibaki went to Nyeri to tell his people that they need to work hard like him. Men should stop being lazy, he said. (Even Lucy contradicted him when she heard this)

That he and Wanjui were simply recipients of spectacular success due the connections and power they held – has passed them completely.

These guys are supposed to guide us forward?

That everybody else kills themselves to make a profit but now City Council charges a Stall Owner 8000 bob for their “sign” – to keep the political class creating fat jobs for their buddies escapes them.

As Parselelo Kantai put it: Kenya is a vampire state.

As our wonderful Minister of Justice said “Baringo and Gatundu are the poorest constituencies in Kenya” – she failed to articulate clearly that they are poor because they will be arrested for stealing a mango – but she wants those who steal the taxpayer’s money given amnesty for “returning the money.

There is no way. No way at all.

That Kibaki’s thieves will be arrested by a Kibaki government – because the thieves are part of The REAL Constituency of this government.

All the rest is spin-doctoring.

Another five years of these guys and we will have a war – South Africa style – where the flowery sides of town (5 percent) will use state resources to keep away the 95 percent – South Africa style – where beautiful roads exists where you can be car-jacked 24 hours a day, raped and disembowelled.

Of late most rape cases at Nairobi Women’s hospital are men – who, sometimes have been raped by gangs of men. Crime is starting to show these kind of revenge violence where money ceases to be the primary objective. Meanwhile we are being told about mad villagers. By Uncle Joe.

Over the past three years, a cadre of fat and rich wazees have been financing a “Gikuyu revival” – this looks nice and happy on the surface – but most of its substance is the spreading of hate speech against all other tribes – the idea being that “we” are somehow special and godchosen to lead Kenya – because the rest are crazy or lazy. The “barbarians” need to be kept to their “areas” – while ‘we’ move around with impunity.

There has been an aggressive Gikuyuisation of the Kenya Institute of Education, much of Kenya’s media (KBC, the radio stations of SK Macharia (who have bigger reach in Kenya than KBC) and the Receiver of Revenue: one of these departments decides everything our children will read, the other is breaking tax collection records.

But – There have been massive pressures from the Kenyan public over the past 16 years – in many ways to have a leadership that is accountable to issues.

The implications of all of this are obvious.

Remember also: NARC Kenya does not have money to run next years campaigns. Anglo Leasing was stopped before they could manufacture slush fund – so for the referendum, they used tax payers money. So these billions being collected will be used, and abused, and the bigger threat there is to Kibaki, the more they will abuse this. To keep themselves in power, they will spend it all. But – this will of course means that they will lose the credibility of their support base.

Yes? Maybe: the gamble is: to make the Gikuyu so paranoid about the “beasts from the west” they will believe that this abuse was necessary to prevent foaming tribals descending on the properties of “hard-working and god-fearing Gikuyus” – this is the campaign strategy to keep the Gikuyu masses in the fold – and have a substantial base to build on for the election – for with this, all is needed is kidogo -kidogo from the rest of Kenya.

But – there is a problem. Though the older generations of Gikuyus still have post-Emergency fears for their well being and post-Moi fears and so on. The younger are not quite so “disciplined” – they have no stake in Coffee, or Tea or Milk – no title deeds, and not much fondness for the wazee.

But – the well-travelled, better educated class of young Gikuyus have their heads in the sand. the Kibaki government is good for them: it understands pavement cleaning and flower gardens in roundabouts – and making life good if you work for a bank. That these benefits are every short-lived is not a question. Tukule sasa.

No coalition of visible younger Gikuyus has made their position clear on issues. None is saying anything about the rising xenophobia.

There are some people talking to young people all over the country, to be aggressive about their political demands – but many Kenyan abroad keep fanning the idea of this new uGikuyu – and ignore the fact that is will benefit no ordinary Kenyan, and may lead to blood on the streets.

I believe Kenya has changed more in the past 4 years than in the past 40. For the first time there is powerful public pressure on an antiquated system. In fact, I think that we are nearer getting a reasonably accountable government than we imagine – the acts of this government have the flavour of desperation – they know their time is up and are trying to grab what they can. So the journey is not too long.

I urge all thinking Gikuyus to completely ignore any attempts to fan your tribal pride – this is the single biggest hurdle facing us in building a meaningful government. The purpose of this is to continue to fuck you, and your children and their children, as you have been fucked since 1952.

If Kibaki’s people come back to power, the gloves will be off. Like Moi, they will have so embedded themselves in our national bloodstream – it will be 27 years before their clique will cede power.

Believe the nonsense at your peril.

Uncle Joe said…

Binyavanga a leopard can hide but it can’t hide its spots. I don’t live in an idealistic world. I used to, when I was younger. I now live in a practical world. if you are not the ODM youthwinger that I think you are, why haven’t you criticized the thieves in ODM, the looters and those who made others lie low like envelopes in the past?

Are you blind to some evil or are you blind to all evil. The notion you keep repeating that I am defending my thief is a big joke. So you want me to support another community’s thug… is that what you call justice and progress.
Will Kenya only progress if old people retire and hand over power to younger looters and killers? Is that what you are saying?

You disappoint me wa Mwangi. You disappoint me wa Mwangi. Why don’t you just come with it and tell us what it is you want instead of hiding behind being progressive. If it is indeed true that you are not an ODM youth winger and say Kenya is much bigger than the two. Tell the young people what the options are. Tell them what party you are supporting, who you want them to vote for against the flowerplanters.

I have been labelled as one of those who call people beasts, where is the dynamic thinking you were talking about cant I be a kyuk who loves my tribe. Why does my love for my roots have to mean that I hate others for theirs? Does loving my tribe automatically refer to others as beasts? What dynamic reasoning is this, from what era does this dynamic thinking come from?

it make come as a shock wa Mwangi I am actually younger than you. I grew up in an urban metropolis and attended a national school. I have travelled and seen other societies both within Africa and without and I must say I have never seen anything like this.

You see the truth is you want to see the glass half empty and I see a glass half full. I am being realistic believing we can change things from within as young people but you being the railamaniac I think you are want a revolution with a lynching of all kyuks to go with it .is this what we call progress.

What is wrong with Kibaki planting flowers on roundabouts are you against the beautification of our cities, is it a sin or misnomer? what about the growing economy have you forgotten about that, and the jobs that have been created since?

Why is it you rush to attack and drag people you have never met in the mad (and why are they only from Narc?) Why don’t you tell us of the Kojwanga’s and the stolen clients money, the Ntimamas and the kikuyu blood that flows from his pangas? Have you developed selective memory?

Has the Rwanda experience taught you nothing? Was it only Tutsis who died or did Hutus suffer also? Revolutions don’t work in Africa their results are only bloodshed. So stop being a kyuk apologetic. We have done nothing wrong and don’t need you to speak up or apologize for us. if this is an issues of ideas lets talk about ideas all this talk about tribes is making me sick.

When kibaki was planting flowers was he planting them for Kikuyus only or was he planting them for the nation that is the question I want you to think about?

Binyavanga said…

Nice one, Uncle Joe, Dear Dear uncle Joe: are you so limited in options and faith for our beautiful country that all you can dream is that one is either ODM or NARC KENYA…?

Love it. ‘Reveal One’s true colours’ – proper Kenya politicospeak – my subject is specific: Gikuyu xenophobia which makes one quite able to choose a genuine thieving devil for the sorts of reasons the Rwandese learned were not taking them anywhere; and the Ugandans learned, painfully, were never going anywhere – the idea that one chooses a thief of one’s tribe over sensible person of another is insane – and scary when ordinary educated people start talking like this – the tone and intensity of the dislike and propaganda is worse than it was in 69, and threatens good order in Kenya.

I am not hiding anything bro – the world is much more complex than ODM – a new and somewhat fishy organisation not that different from NARC Kenya, NARC and the rest…same sort.

There is a lot more in Kenya. ODM and NARC are now what we deserve because we are refusing to dream better.

The space is open – but we have inherited habits from the old political system where we imagine the basic options thrust at us are all that can be on offer – the space is wide open. The space is wide open.

The space is WIDE open.

Binyavanga said…

The People I Have Loved

I do not know if I would pick arms for this country; I do not know even whether the flag really means that much to me. All I can commit to: for my life and death – is the people and landscapes (real and metaphorical) that I have loved; those who took journeys and time with me; those who survived hard times; taught me – those who speak my language – by this I mean those who I need not say anything with grammar for them to understand what I mean. Now love cannot arrange itself in clean lines – I have loved from places that do not account for my background or tribe.
These fragile and powerful places can be the beginning of a nation – by consensus.
But hate is mathematical: for when people come under the slogan of hate: such and such people are like such and such – all relationships that derive from this shall be symmetrical. It becomes easy to cut away, end friendships, and kill wives when the symmetry of hate is clear within you.
Maybe this is why it is said by the philosophers of war and nation that nationhood and patriotism is built by blood – against a common enemy: that people of forty languages will quickly become “one” after a bruising ten year war with a foreign “outsider” who threatens everybody’s well-being.
A Nation by blood
Maybe the way our Uncle Joes flirt with this rhetoric is simply because we have never been at war. We have seen, over the past century, time and time again, whole groupings butchered based on words that sound exactly like Uncle Joe’s. The Rwanda rhetoric was about “clearing” or “cleaning” – a distant future dream of a symmetrical time where all over Kenya, atiriri will be sang, and messy other things shall not intervene.
There are positions that can be taken: with trust good faith – and build bridges even when they do not lead to clear progress – because we have only one other option: put a fence around yourself and arm.
Brussels, the city – for five hundred years, spent most of its surplus on the building of fortifications; one after another each collapsing after some conquest or other and rebuilding beginning immediately and more ambitiously. It was the city’s most ambitious project – generations of progress and wealth were sucked up into war and fortifications – and only the late entry of massive Congo money made Brussels rich.
Armed relationships escalate.
The question about ODM right now is meaningless. The government in power in NARC Kenya, and they are asking YOU – to assume that they are valid and viable because the ONLY other thing in Kenya is the Beast from the West.
The idea behind this, of course (Kenyan politics is very crude – it is us who try to put in pethos) – to suck you into the Soap Opera of two players – and escalate the shit, till we are all standing behind walls with machetes and voting cards saying ai even if I went to a National school, those Luos, those Luos, those Luos…and at some point the Luo ceases to become a person.
Anybody questioning NARC Kenya becomes an “ODM Youth Winger”
…and that is a declaration of war. What Uncle Joe said was he is at war. Rwanda is not an example, to him, of how not to do it – it is a territory of “similar examples” to justify his war-like stance.
What is actually being said is: there is no room for other – and we all know, there is no conversation or debate to be had with a youth winger. You either flee or fight. And that Youth Winger you see may be a doctor, a teacher, the guy who saved you from bullies when you were a kid, it may even be a Gikuyu who happens to have a gap he got in a bar-fight. And of course, we are not yet in 2007. In 2007, what would Uncle Joe be invoking to show his fears: for if the Youth Winger is the lowest, most violent of Kenyans, the rung below that is bestial, no longer human. And once people are persuaded that a whole group of such are a-comin’ they are a comin’ to getcha……
Now Uncle Joe has made it clear he is not “fleeing from the beast” so I guess he is “fighting the beast”
So fight, bwana. Fight away. I have nothing more to say to you man. Do your thing.

Meanwhile – let us all remember, all these warlords, ODM, NARC – when the accounting is done – they all own shit in each other’s backyards. You cannot separate the shares of Moi in this economy and the shares of Kibaki. Uhuru and his “uncle” Moi.
They are partners and need to make this temperature so we never realise who the real enemy is. Amazing how the only consensus in this government was when MPs wanted salary increments.
It is all about symmetry: if The Gikuyus can be made to hate; the Luos made to hate, the Kalenjins made to hate – they are easy to manage, and rob. They will defend their mdosi to the bitter end.
Haha. Uncle Joe! I had a good laugh with that one!
What is wrong with planting flowers in roundabouts? It is beautifying the city!
I am stuck everyday in the stupidest jam this side of the Sahara – as the most illogical and beautiful roundabout in Kileleshwa (actually shaped in a kind of wobbly oval) is manned by a very prettily dressed man who knows nothing about flow of traffic and is making empty hand gestures inherited from the colonial era without thought.
And we hoot and bang our heads and forget to stop and smell the beautiful flowers in the beautiful roundabout.
The roundabout is very very beautiful, Uncle Joe – and utterly meaningless – it comes from the mentality of those who were taught in shiny Vaseline colonial missionary schools how to copy and how not to think for yourself. The roundabout has been removed from all urban plans of even stupider governments than ours. I am waiting for them to start whitewashing stones around pavements.
Or build a new matatu rank, like the one in Westlands – that completely forgot to think about the hundreds of thousands of people who would need to cross the busiest highway in Kenya to get to the matatu.
The rank is very very pretty indeed. And very very useless indeed.
And educated people will defend them – because a person of their tribe built them. Na hiyo, as Moi said, ni Maendeleo.

The most comical thing about all this is the children: you will see the children of warlords whose “tribes” are butchering each other, visit each other’s homes, date, marry, party together, go to the same schools and attend each other’s weddings. While you foam at the mouth for your leaders, their children are very happy having multi-tribal sex and fun and compassion even – they can afford it.
And each successive government will need to do exactly the same thing to finance this lifestyle. So long as their loyal defenders continue to carry their flag.
How many of us will stand up to be counted on what we DO not want, and what we DO not tolerate.

A Letter to My Father, and Others

Dear Baba,

This is an odd and public and rhetorical letter, on a subject that recent tradition has asked us to sweep under the carpet. I find myself, at 35, at odds with the tone and nature and political space that is Gikuyu. For the first time in my life, in the Kibaki government, my identity as a Gikuyu has been questioned, I have seen text messages distributed amongst Gikuyus about “beasts from the West” and the like.

You have brought me up to be a skeptical person, a thinking person, a Kenyan first, a Nakuru boy, a person who believes in solid institutions, in building them, and growing them – as you did so well for so many years.

This present wave of “uGikuyu” seems to have sucked up a whole generation of people: who believe that the future of Kenya lies ONLY under a Gikuyu umbrella. To me this seems like crazy and corrupt politics, capitalising on the post- Mau Mau, and post Kenyatta entitlements and paranoias that have been past on from parent to child, often without explanation or analysis – and now what is we have is a vague formless fear of the unknown from the ‘other side’.

Last week, some young man, a university graduate told me that the clashes were about “the KAMATUSA tribes killing the Gikuyus”. Basic information would counter this – but educated people, PARENTS, are passing this bigotry on.

On the other side of our family: from Mum’s side, a genocide happened.

I find I cannot be silent about the politiking and the text messaging xenophobia that has infected, it seems, all sensible Gikuyus. I say this because no prominent people are speaking against this: this insane kitchen cabinet of an insane presidency is using fear to keep Gikuyus on their side, and this is causing serious damage to our place, and the place of our children in a future Kenya. Not even the Moi Kalenjin junta caused so much social and tribal friction, in such a short time. It is now Gikuyu versus Kenya – with yuppies saying Kenya does not know what it talking about because Kibaki has planted flowers in roundabouts.

Like any, many young people, I am at a loss what do or say. We are heading to a very dangerous place, displaying a sense of entitlement and ethnic chauvinism that can only lead to violence – all, its seems, to keep a few people who made money during Kenyatta’s time happy and wealthy.

Some friends of mine have said that we are “owed” because we “suffered” under Moi.

Who did not suffer under Moi?

Many people want to speak of these things and agree there is a problem in bars and huddles and not in public. Few people have this conversation with their parents. In clear and naked transparency. Why?

You did not bring me up to react like this.

I will not react like this. I know how much you have believed and invested in the idea of a functional and forward-looking Kenya. I feel that the Gikuyus who feel this way should make themselves public – it is not an affirmation of anything, no ideology – simply a declaration of one’s loyalty to a good and clean Kenya

Is it not time that right minded people started to speak out?

I am sending this email out to you all trusted friends, with love. Post, and distribute this if you can.

Please forward the question to those you feel want to start a dialogue. What is the challenge of this generation? Why is nobody of your generation making their stand clear? Is this government something to approve of? Are “we” behind this new government?

Am I missing a particular conversation?

Why can’t we name this problem?

How can we stop the hate?

With much love,

Your son,

Binyavanga Wainaina

Staring Death in the Face on the Drive to Jomo Kenyatta Airport

After a week of Digital Indaba polemics, entertaining outraged comments from South Africa, I had my moment of Outrage on the way to the airport yesterday morning. My flight for Addis Ababa from Nairobi was scheduled to leave at such a time as made it necessary for me to be at the airport by 5.30am. As is always the case in Nairobi, this departure was heading toward the ‘one for the road’ till flight-time script. But Sohos where we were downing beers – and which I dislike and yet for some reason keep finding myself patronizing – closed early and I was forced to return home in good time to pack and get some sleep. The plan was for K____, my usual taxi driver, to turn up in good time and so he did. As I got into the battered Toyota, I noticed he was quieter than usual, that the front end had a new largish dent and that he seemed to have forgotten the way out of my place. But then I thought it must be the late hour and that perhaps even the curious slowness of his driving was due to his having woken up earlier than usual. This working theory, plus the mild hangover I was suffering all fled as we were pulling into Mbagathi Way (a highway under construction so that both directions of traffic have to share a single road.) My dear K____ was at the stop sign for a full minute though the road was quite empty of traffic. He only decided to pull out, with excruciating slowness, the moment cars were bearing down on us from both directions. They came screeching to a stop and one of the drivers rolled down his window and let go such a furious – and at such an early hour, impressive – flood of curses. K_____ merely nodded his head slowly from side to side as if in sadness that the other drivers could be so unreasonable and unskilled. It was only when he proceeded to drive in the middle of the road, seeming to weave toward the path of oncoming cars, as if somehow their headlights were what to aim for, that I realized that K____ – he of the frequent lectures on the importance of responsibility and punctuality in the working man – was roaring drunk.

‘K____,’ I asked carefully hoping not to distract him further, ‘have you been drinking?’ Silence. ‘Have you been drinking, please tell me,’ I pleaded knowing by this time that the answer must be in the affirmative. Oncoming cars were hooting and driving half on the road and half off it to avoid the Grim Ripper who was clearly now in control of that Toyota. And K____ was his angel of death. What with his sleepy answers, sunken, darkened cheeks, that now as I looked at him made me realize that for the past year I have been getting rides from a man who has ceded much of the flesh of his body to cheap liquors and late hours. I knew that we were never going to make by the time we got to the roundabout near the Barbados Children’s Home, about two kilometers from my first realization that he was drunk out of his mind.

‘I think I must have eaten something that disagreed with me,’ came the reply after long minutes of waiting. I have myself used this never-to-be-believed phrase and the next one as well. ‘I think I am just really sleepy, I have been having such a tough time sleeping. I even scrapped a gate on my way to you.’ The grave for mmk it was, even before the end of the Digital Indaba talkfest. Perhaps this is what comes of questioning do-gooding. That God, the lover of justice and empowerment, sends a drunk driver to your doorstep who crashes you head-on into an oncoming truck. Maybe K____ too had been rude to White South Africans as he carried them from the airport and so Justice was going to kill two birds with one stone.

‘Pullover K____, now!’ by this time I was hysterical. What a bad way to go.

Long story short: he stopped and I took over and drove to the airport with him fast asleep and even snoring in the back. I parked the car with him still fast asleep in it and took my flight. Once again Nairobi having ushered me into its curious blend of terror and comedy, on the way to Addis Ababa where dangerous driving such as K’s would not even make me twitch an eyelid as common and normal as it seems once I am here.

Is the Digital Indaba the Internet Berlin Conference of 2006?

(This post is a follow-on to a previous one on next week’s Digital Indaba on Blogging and the resulting comments that included accusations of my being racist and illegitimate)

Does the African blog-space – if there is such a thing – need codification, a coming together, a corralling under the auspices of a code of conduct or a common front? I do not think so and yet I have noticed a recent trend toward this end of trying to create a ‘mainstream’ African blog-space that confers ‘legitimacy’ on its members. Implying, if only gently, that those outside its auspices are illegitimate at worst or at best might be irrelevant to goals as varied as civil society ‘empowerment’, the creation of alternate media, etc. We are living in a world that increasingly looks to observed and enforced standards. It is almost as if the more peoples become exposed to one another, by virtue of blogging for example, the greater is the discomfort of those associated with the West (like the White so-called Africans who pissed me off by calling this blog racist and illegitimate.) They want a world where bloggers are ‘responsible citizens’, ‘legitimate’ and ‘empowerment minded.’ As noble as such sentiments sound, they have lurking behind them not an evil conspiracy but rather an instinct to occupy territory – the high ground of individual African blogging ideas and opinions – which has been much talked about in the last couple of years in the international and local media.

What organizers and conveners of events such as the Digital Indaba on Blogging refuse to recognize is the essential magic of blogging which is that every blog is THE CENTER. It is made so by the decision of one person to speak as they will, when they will, about whatever they wish. The blog’s audience, if it exists, is therefore treated to an act of one. Consider how many unique minds or perspectives can come to the fore due to this freedom. It is not that the Indaba will still the blogger. Rather, combined with others like it in the future, it will act like a force of gravity by forming positions, networks and attitudes that by virtue of advertisement and promotion occupy the centre or rather attempt to claim such occupation for themselves so that bloggers who are not ‘inside’ will presumably operate in the margins. As if there is not enough of that already within the traditional forms of media.

A central goal of these kinds of meetings is to move ideas and knowledge out of their tacit forms – where they are owned by individuals and received by individuals – to codified forms. Not for the benefit of the blogger but rather to profit the administrator who enables and ‘owns’ the codifying space. Knowledge when it is codified is made into a standardized message that is precious in the marketplace, far more in many instances that its tacit counterpart. Codification allows easy reproduction and because to do it means knowledge being more exactly described, it becomes easier to mark as intellectual property. This is a good thing since it can now be transmitted cheaper to a wider audience, creating profits and, when of a positive nature, leading to better societies. Unfortunately this is not the process the indaba represents. Let me explain.

The high costs in producing knowledge are start up ones – usually paid in the initial phase when ideas or knowledge are tacit. That is to say the writing of your blog is tougher, more expensive, than holding a conference of bloggers to come up with an organizing principle or organizational character. But since many ideas in blogs are not worth much financially, the value is to be had in the joining. By the one who claims to have created the common ground you stand on with others. The blogger who would join an ‘African Code of Conduct’ might earn some minor monies from a conference per diem or from a donor. But the one who will really clean up, in financial and power terms, will be the convener of the conference: the institution or person who boasts of ‘facilitating’ African voices, helping them ‘make a huge impact by sharing knowledge and enthusiasm and demonstrating to the rest of the world that Africa is more than a passive observer in the global village’ (quote from the website of next week’s first Indaba on Blogging)

Blogging on this continent does not need midwives. Especially not ones who want to demonstrate ‘to the rest of the world that Africa is more than a passive observer in the global village.’ It is this kind of defeatism and obsession with the opinions of others that puts paid to the creation of independent paths of our own. That we should now blog to show the world (read the West and White folks) that we are somehow worthy of their respectful consideration. What nonsense. Perhaps the way to ’show the world’ is to have a conference of black people in the audience listening to panels basically made up of white people. You know? To hope that the authority of whiteness rubs off on the poor little African blogosphere. I wish I will be proven wrong about such panels but the defensiveness of the white Mandelas tells the tale. Ultimately though, whoever the panelists are, and despite the ‘rush for white,’ the logic of this benignly conducted colonisation of Africa’s blog universe will have plenty of rainbow colored African volunteers.

What really pulls my goat among all the ills of this ‘inclusive’ event is the corralling of bloggers – most of whom are just doing their own thing – into the donor universe. Consider once again the language of the Indaba which views blogging, at least in one aspect, thus:

Blogging, because of its far reach and networking qualities, is an essential tool in ensuring that the UN Millennium Development Goals are achieved in Africa and NEPAD remains a united and benevolent alliance on the continent.

Millennium development goals? NEPAD? Ensuring that it remains a united and benevolent alliance? That, ladies and gentlemen, is called the language of the hustler. Some wise African – and he or she could be white or black – who has identified an angle, a cow to milk. And that cow is you dear blogger. You are going to be positioned, united with others, invited to liberal, black loving Grahamstown. Even before you leave, little hustle proposals on ‘empowering African voices’ will be in the mail, probably on the same flight as you. Not that you will ever get more than a few cents. What you will get though is a big, prominent logo on your site that says something like Proud Member of Indaba Code. Somewhere in the proposal will be the sentence, ‘Indaba and company, a non-profit, civil society initiative, is proud to announce that 5% of known African blogs have signed up to the Code of Conduct we established and will form an important African digital voice in the achievement of the MDGs and the sustenance of NEPAD’s profile. We now require further funding for the Indaba to expand its activities…’

In return for a few bloggers being thrown the bone to listen to ‘20 renowned and respected speakers from across the globe and a confirmed line-up that would make Silicon Valley jealous,’ many others will operate in a blog-space that is marked and demarcated territory by little people who would try and update the Berlin 1885 scramble for Africa to the digital space. My railing against this process will not stop it I know, but I think it is important to be aware that what the Indaba and like conferences represent is a grab for territory. And when the African internet Bismarcks and Leopolds can call me racist for asking a question, then you better be aware that the gloves are going to be off during this scramble. The weapons will be to meet challenges with a deafening silence; refer to them as ‘unacceptably racist and misinformed’ (courtesy of one Vincent ‘Madiba’ Maher); and the calling of even more conferences. But, blogging being what it is and since they have decided to piss off the worst Gikuyu this side of the keyboard, I will only say this: I am watching and will ask questions first and then pull the trigger to my nukes later.

Comments on “(White?) African Blogger Conference in a Week”

Below are some comments on the last post I had on the upcoming African bloggers indaba. It turned out that AB&H is racist and illegitimate. I will be back to talk more about the attempt to codify the African blog space and make it part of a kind of NGO-ish, funded civil society space with established mores. In other words, the attempt to bring it in line. Original Post

Anonymous said…
I guess you’re upset because you didn’t get a free ticket to the conference, sorry for you.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 7:53:16 AM

MMK said…
anonymous – haha. Indeed, the obvious comment comes forth. Thanks for being sorry.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 8:06:58 AM

Binyavanga said…
Hey,I think I read on Ory’s blog that there were scholarships, whic irritates more because why were people not asked. Maybe some would come on their own steam?
Thursday, September 07, 2006 8:44:32 AM

Vincent Maher said…
The scholarship applications have closed, there were more than 200 applications and the final selections have already been made.This event was announced to the media and to several bloggers who linked to it. If you search for it on Google you will find 280 links to the web site. It was also sent out in the Poynter E-Media Tidbits list.Obviously we could not invite each person in Africa individually, and we hope that it will be successful enough for more applications next year.In general I think this blog post is unacceptably racist and misinformed but I have published my perspective on my own blog.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 8:55:03 AM

MMK said…
Scholarships. The assumption as ever is that Africans are broke, always in need of a (white?)helping hand. I am quite sure that the conference was advertised but as someone who spends hours online, I am puzzled that I did not run into it until yesterday. I hope that the sessions will be taped so that we can see who indeed is an African citizen, blogger, moblogger, vlogger, podcaster, hactivist and new media journalist.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 8:55:13 AM

MMK said…
Here is the link to a fuller explanation of why AB&H is now a racist blog that lacks credibility. The very credibility that can be enjoyed by joining the African citizens Code of Conduct.http://nml.ru.ac.za/maher/?p=137To the program of events: http://dci.ru.ac.za/documents/Draft_Programme2.pdf
Thursday, September 07, 2006 9:09:50 AM

Sammie said…
LOL at “The Hustle” that is the African situation. Africa sounds so hopeless a place to live in!I believe it’s a much better place than say Europe!I was reading somewhere that the American Dream is over, and seeing how self-respecting Africans are demeaning themselves in the name of asylum in Europe, i see where all this (mis)information is coming from.The hustle is further propagated by the brain-drain, where our brilliant minds are given scholarships, and attain green cards, citizenship and stuff, only to be dumped back here when wasted. Look at our current political class. Akina Musyoka, raila, Kibs, The whole lot of them; products of the hustle, turned activists.Pole for the long comment.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 9:14:07 AM

bankelele said…
Ory posted it at her site about a month ago with the scholarship mention. Am happy to have been invited.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 9:16:36 AM

Rista said…
Binyavanga and MMK, you are clearly looking in all the wrong places [good looking out bankele] The ’scholarships’ are always a good idea, but they should be renamed to read something innocuous like ‘conference/travel support’.Vincent, laudable work. Thanks for lending a helping hand to blogging in africa. It’s quite clear your efforts are still not reaching a (significant?) portion of your target audience… might want to rethink the strategy. That said, I wonder how many bonafide black south african bloggers will be at this conference. I am of the old school in believing that the word ‘racist’ cannot be used to describe an african, so i’d recommend you take a different tack when blogging in the ‘african’ space.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 10:05:17 AM

Vincent Maher said…
Rista, you may be right regarding our efforts though right now we’re focussing on Southern Africa.I can’t agree with you on your other point about Africans being exempt from racism, I have seen a lot of racism between all different races in my life, including Africans. Obviously you’re entitled to your opinion, as am I, and I respect that.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 10:51:54 AM
Zephyr said…
Ai mmk, even I, who is a relative bloggo-virgo heard about it.Sometimes, it is good to first, swallow the sour grapes. then blog. I’ll provide the whisky to down them . Of course assuming that you can do grapes with whisky.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 10:59:55 AM

Alex Maughan said…
After reading your post mmk, I initially got angry. But now, having spoken about it with the people that happen to be in the room with me… wait, before continuing, let’s count the races in this room for your sake, since you are so obsessed with skin colour: 1 “Indian”, 2 “blacks”, and 1 “white” – or is he more of a grey colour due his very dark body hair? – all are Africans by the way)..anyway, like I was saying, after discussing your rationale – if that’s what one can generously call your racism (and yes, rista, black people can be racist too… do the moral maths yourself, cos I don’t feel like wasting my time on your ignorant and short-sighted claim) – I now find it quite humorous, as do the others in the room. Your claims viz. the scholarships are especially funny. So now, having had a good laugh with all in the room, I am purged of my anger and no longer feel the need to break down the logic of your argument (which would have been done easily with the use of your own ideological premises, as I wouldn’t dare impose a “white” form of deduction on your subjectivity).Thank you for reminding me that even if people like you revel in subjecting everything to a white-on-black form of racism, there are many others (such as those in the room with me) that have more sense.So in the end, I have said nothing really, other than expressing my thanks, and, I suppose, that is enough. There is so much wrong with your argument, that I’ll end up wasting my time deconstructing it, and will enivitably waste your time too (since you will never be able to truly consider my overall objection until you remove that anger-filled race card that obscures your critical thought).Other than that, congratulations on a greatly informative blog (oh wait, what did we all learn from this again?… shucks, my red-neck, honke-rambling brain just aint wat’d used to be.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 11:54:05 AM

Binyavanga said…
Oh very juicy! Are fists flying? Some honke-rambling! Anger-filled race-cards! Good lord, must log on later. Nothing like a good ole conference to set thigs alight. Ah!! I have really missed South Africa…oh the rolling minefields!
Thursday, September 07, 2006 12:37:56 PM

Nic said…
I think that the comments above all illustrate the need for what is being argued against in this post: a code of conduct. For if there was a code of cunduct this post would be well without its boundaries and be disregarded as a worth while post/blog. As for the fact that “africans” cannot be labelled racist, that is the most absurd thing i have ever heard. Many years of political studies has proven to me that although my skin colour may not be black I am still an African. Well said Alex. Furthermore, if this is the case and a multitude or colours are labelled “African” by the informed, then why should there not be white/egyptian/coloured/green/purple/yellow speakers at the conference? If they are all African then who are you to predefine what is and is not African?
Thursday, September 07, 2006 2:23:10 PM

coldtusker said…
binyavanga – Same old, same old… as in Changez… I think you are just adding fuel to the fire & having fun!mmk – I wasn’t invited either but then I didn’t look out for it! It is a enormous web out there!Wacha this “racial” angle… Mark Shuttleworth (born in SA, so what if he is white, SA damu) is arguably one of the richest guys in Africa with real (yaani, NOT stolen/embezzled) money! I bet there are thousands of “black” Africans who were just as knowledgable as MS but toiling in the “West” rather than taking the entrepreneurial road!Tafuta na utapata (Seek & ye shall find)…I was blown away by the Indian IT industry. They are willing to hire US employees so they can “learn” from them! No flase pride, the Indian BPO campuses are similar to the USA. No squalor here! Idea exchange pow-wows!Africa (White, Black, Mwarabu) better get their act in order… We are the last on any list of being IT savvy (expect Polynesia & Micronesia) thus let’s keep the African spirit going!Tata Tea bought Tetleys (UK), Infosys & WIPRO have picked up a number of US firms. Hong Kong, Korean & Taiwanese firms are world-class with LG, Samsung, Hyundai becoming household names!The Asians have becoming globetrotters in 50 years while Africa…wapi?I could say the Egyptians but hey they look more “white” than “black”??? That doesn’t fit your “view”, does it?BTW, I really enjoy your takes on your travels!
Thursday, September 07, 2006 3:29:33 PM

MMK said…
Dear Alex Maughan, Vincent Maher and Nic. Welcome to AB&H. Never doubt the old adage that says living long enough allows one to see the impossible become real. For instance, the surreal sense I have of being called racist by white people in South Africa for asking whether a conference that announces itself as African is in fact disproportionately white. Racism used to be King Leopold’s administration killing 10 million Congolese, or 12 million slaves being carted off to the Americas or even apartheid. Now, so benign is it that it has become the act of hurting the feelings of white people by asking whether this conference is basically a bunch of them mouthing off with a few black tokens strewn here and there. The post for your information was actually meant very tongue-in-cheek; an intention that the fury of your response has now changed to an actual desire to probe further into the little talk shop that you are going to hold in a week’s time. Let us not suppose for even an instant that the label African is so problem-free that all one has to do is invoke it to be clothed in the armor of victimhood which Mr. Maughan and Mr. Maher wear so comfortably. Seeing that those to be empowered by the conference can be Nic’s ‘white/egyptian/coloured/green/purple/yellow’ African gladdens the heart. Where was I all those years when being called an African in South Africa and in Kenya was an insult to anyone without a dark brown skin – was actually being legally consigned to poverty and exclusion? Happily though, the troubles are over. Nirvana is here and all you have to do to join this racial paradise of harmony and fairness is pronounce yourself African. Especially when the whip and the fangs of the dog are safely locked away in history’s vault.

Let me ask the question in simpler and even more racialist language: How many black Africans are represented in your panels in percentage terms? You seemed to be quite willing to supply a painstaking enough count of even those participants who are a ‘grey colour due to his very dark body hair.’ Surely then it would not be too difficult for you to just tell me how many black panelists you have compared with the white/gray ones. Your spirited response to a post on my blog suggests that I have touched a raw nerve. And it must be one that is very often fingered in South Africa where racial positions and language are upended so that black folks are demanding access to influence and opportunity on the basis of race and ability to address decades of apartheid racism. I hate racial labeling myself but I do not kid myself that this is a dead and buried matter, that somehow South Africa and Africa have moved on from white privilege clothing itself in the virtue of helping the ‘darkies’ and speaking in their stead. In conference after Africanist conference, the black Africans from the continent are too often consigned to the sidelines. To be spoken for as they give good service as native or local informants to the important (white) thinkers who are made ‘African’ by the sheer love they lavish on the Dark Continent.

Thanks by the way Mr. Maughan for your kind compliment on my blog at the end of your angry comment. I felt sorry that you would so brutally flay yourself by writing of yourself as having a ‘red-neck, honke-rambling brain…’ This kind of masochism is really sad to see especially when it is a transparent attempt to simultaneously make you appear to be a victim and to enable you to hold onto that delicious frisson of racial pain. I doubt that you are a red-neck; at least not in the way you seem to understand this phrase which I hate. I associate nowadays not with the white violence during the reconstruction period in the American South but rather with a contemporary liberal America that has cast poor white people beyond the pale. Heaping on them all the evils of racism both present and past while they bask in the glow of good deeds – especially in Africa – untouched by the very real racism that is alive to this day.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 3:38:37 PM

MMK said…
coldtusker – have one on me please; I am craving a cold Tusker badly. This is not about invitations anywhere but rather about the anger and defensiveness of people who claim to be about opening up spaces on this continent. The power of blogging is precisely about being able to ask questions as an individual. Especially when I notice a concerted attempt to codify the African blogosphere and make it part of a tired, exhausted white liberal civil society with a few ‘native’ voices to spice it up.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 3:51:27 PM

coldtusker said…
mmk – Tusker…History:Initially brewed by a couple of white brodas in Kenya… I think one of them got gored thus “Tusker” the name was born…It was primarily Kenyan owned for many years until KBL ran into financial trouble. Guinness came in as a white knight & bought a huge stake by pumping in some Sterling…Regardless of Guinness’ control, Tusker is as Kenyan as it gets!So I use Tusker as my mascot (Of course, I love the rich taste!)…It represents all in all, the best of Kenya which does not necessarily mean “black” or “african” or “white” or… just great taste & quality.Oh, they beat the crap out of the S.Africans (fronted by njenga karume who made his money off a KBL distributorship)! I’ll take a Tusker over castle or miller or bud any day!
Thursday, September 07, 2006 5:10:58 PM

Binyavanga said…
Let’s get to a juicer subject. Rhodes University…been a while since I sampled that particular brand of nonsense. “We didn’t knoooow..we never kneeeew. If only we kneeeeeeeew what the Afrikaners were doooing. Our heads were in the sand, positioned nobly in with good intentions.”Travelling down the Eastern Cape in the 90s, I ended up having more respect for the redneck towns of the border, where black people were clearly tagged and demarcated – but at least recognised as even a threat a viable possibility, the boycotting people. Those silly “they they” attitudes of that leedle town called Grahamstown – where the township was the flithiest I had ever seen, the poorest and the most invisible. And the town: church-spiring and boater wielding, kind to blacks – a kind of island of civility that can only come from real violence – for it lives as if there is no threat, in a country still gaseous with possibilities and the whole messy angry “really so racist” country called South Africa was not in Rhodes, (RHODES) but out there but Rhodies (shall we call them) bravely read Cryyyyyyyy – The Beloved, Beeeeloved. Country. Then a friend telling me how her wide eyed and liberal friends at Rhodes used to thank the “Aunties” at the end of term by having them stand in a chorus and sing for the Undergrads. Some of these women were grandmothers. When she complained she was told, “Ohhhh they really love doing this!”I have often wondered how that little town which by sheer force of will decided to be Cambridge at Cape for over a hundred head-in-sand years, suddenly discovered over the final minutes of the Rugby World Cup that it was African, and African was a wonderful rainbow with free and easy membership.Oops. Not sure. Have I broken the code of conduct? Is the code of conduct actually going to specify who can use the term African; and demarcate where it is right and where it is wrongly applied?Oh Dear MMK…bad blogger. Bad Bad blogger. You have broken the code!
Thursday, September 07, 2006 5:43:34 PM

Ntwiga said…
Interesting post that has generated a ton of comments. While I agree somewhat witht he content of the post, I cannot subscribe to the way in which it was presented – but again, thats just me. Some thoughts;1. Being white and being African are not mutually exclusive so that part of the argument may be facetious.2. Arguing that this post is racist smacks of “but I have lots of black friends, how can I be racist”ism.There are so many ways of looking at this that it would be insulting to try and pretend to cover them all in a comment.It is however possible to do a quanlitative analysis: I count 6 out of 19 as being black. Does that mean that this counts as another Live 8 type event?Strike1here & here2Ory Okolloh3“Ashraf Patel” nothing here really – but there are lots of Africans named Patel so I make that three4Fackson Banda5 Emaka Okafor, just ignore the basketball player.6 Ramon ThomasStrikeMike StopforthTom Johnson – Nothing definite comes upStrikeRay HartleyJuanita Williams – Nothing definite comes upChris RoperStrikeAlex HoggStrikeIan GilfillanStrikeAndrew RensStrikeVincent Maher or hereStrikeAndrew Heavens ((l to r) Andrew Heavens, Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca MacKinnon) from here.
Thursday, September 07, 2006 8:05:49 PM

Vincent Maher said…
As I said in the comments here, this conference is the first of it’s kind, it is going to be a lot of fun and it will be a step in the right direction for blogging on this continent.

I was born in Africa, lived here all my life and consider myself an African. I hate the colonial enterprises, the World Bank and whoever else has damaged this continent and I was not old enough to vote during apartheid. If anyone has a problem with that, tough.

Every year people travel down to Highway Africa to learn from people who have a certain type of media production experience and exchange their own experiences. It is a confluence and it works, so maybe you had better experience it before you shout from the sidelines that it’s a white thing. I certainly don’t think of a conference organised by black Africans as a black thing, so maybe that says something.

What I am tired of is being categoried along with the Eurpoean butchers and oppressors, if you met me you would know that I don’t fit into that category.

Friday, September 08, 2006 9:16:15 AM

sokari said…
BH is right in his assessment that this conference is white and not even African white for that matter and is an “attempt to codify the African blog space and make it part of a kind of NGO-ish, funded civil society space with established mores. In other words, the attempt to bring it in line.” – well said and anon- yes not particularly original in your thoughts. well we know two Africans, ory and bankelele who are the rest?
This fits in well with why I left GV last June – too many big white mothers and fathers – same old same old

Saturday, September 09, 2006 1:21:52 PM
sokari said…
BTW – zimpundit isnt attending after all for his/her own personal safety – understandable.

Binyavanga said…
The new thing is now that this whole brouhaha is based on the dea that “some people” (MK and Myself?) are bitter that they were not give scholarships and Mahler is upset at the entitlement of this. I am really loving all this. I am not even a blogger! Oh how anger reveals! So MK – do you want a scholarship to INDABA? At the lovely Rhodes? Will that pacify your bitterness? Man – I had really forgotten SA – that your objection to the premise behind something is an attempt to put your hand out and receive Black Empowerment? Is the shit there so cynical now? So now the voice is sanctimonious – saying that they can’t with all integrity bend to your subversive request for inclusion.

What would happen MK – if you write a hand-wringing private email to them and say you have “unresolved issues” and you “acknowledge them” and “your history and personal poverty and general desparateness for a scholarship” made it difficult to appreciate what “a sensible and earnest” thing it is that they are doing – what would happen?

Because that is the script.

cirdan said…
MMK, this guy is an African, if anybody is.

(White?) African Blogger Conference in a Week

Word on the street, the Khartoum one where I am for the week, is that there is a Digital Citizen Indaba on Blogging conference being held in Grahamstown, South Africa. It is a shock that there should be this kind of meeting without AB&H being told about it. From the list of speakers, listed below, it appears to my untrained and possibly quite mistaken eye that their last names are not very black African; at least they wouldn’t be in East Africa. (Whisper: Will it be a roomful of white folks working for the betterment of the African? Please, I beg you, do not tell massa that I asked cause I know how much he is trying to help me speak and develop into a full, happy human being.)

I feel that I have no choice but to trash it; what is blogging if not a weapon for attacking the virtuous? This admittedly may be difficult because the conference actually seems quite interesting. It appears from the program that the attendees will be treated to dispositions from lawyers versed in internet issues – whatever those are – and that there is even a session to establish ‘an African Citizens Code of Conduct.’ Now that last one I find weird. The power of the internet and blogging is precisely that it is not being planned or coordinated centrally or even subject to a particular point of view. In any case are Africans so misbehaved or even depraved that they are always being subject to codes of behavior? Is the governance agenda and its associated funding buzzwords now to seek us out even in the digital world?

Whenever African is combined with words like empowerment, development, agenda, code, The People, plan, unity, globalization, and a conference is convened, I suspect a hustle. The same kind you would encounter in any brothel bar or illegal drinking den in any city on the continent. You know the guy who sidles next to you, face drawn and haggard with worry, and then says, ‘excuse me please, I came to the city and had all my money stolen. Now I just need help with a little bus fare to return home.’ Or ‘hey, you want good time? I will show you good, clean girls – or boys if you like.’ These hustles precisely match the ones that go something like this: ‘Funding this conference to develop the girlchild’s access to blogging will enable her African voice to be heard in the era of superpower driven globalization.’

As always, the ‘establishment’ in the form of the traditional media and academia, not to mention the political classes, come to the latest advances in expression late and with all manner of grand pronouncements heralding shifting paradigms and revolutionary action. This very worthy meeting to which I would again observe AB&H is not invited seems to fit the scheme exactly. I am sure there will be moans and sighs over the disproportionately low number of bloggers in Africa; and firm declarations to close the ‘digital divide’ and ‘empower’ Africans. Out of the conference will come a flood of little proposals to every development agency in the land – ‘help us speak to the world’ will be the theme. There are 20 speakers invited:

Ethan Zuckerman (Global Voices, USA) – Alaa Abd El Fattah (Blogger & Activist, Egypt) – Pieter Verweij (Senior Lecturer, University of Utrecht, Netherlands) – Matthew Buckland (Publisher, Mail & Guardian Online) – Ory Okolloh (Blogger & Activist) – Ashraf Patel (ICT Programme Officer, OSISA) – Zimbabwean Pundit (Political Blogger) – Fackson Banda (SABMiller Chair of Media Democracy, Rhodes) – Emeka Okafor (Blogger & Business Journalist) – Ramon Thomas (Managing Director, NETucation) – Mike Stopforth (Communications Strategist) – Tom Johnson (Institute for Analytic Journalism, USA) – Ray Hartley (Deputy-Editor, Sunday Times) – Juanita Williams (News Editor, IOL) – Chris Roper (Online Editor, 24.com) – Alec Hogg (CEO, Moneyweb) – Ian Gilfillan (IT Author & Blogger) – Andrew Rens (Intellectual Property Legal Expert) – Vincent Maher (Director, New Media Lab, Rhodes) – Andrew Heavens (Photojournalist & Blogger)

You may have noticed that 13 of the 20 do not appear to be bloggers; I hope the speeches are put online so that I can savage or praise them with due consideration.

We can clamp down on antisocial children before birth…

Tony Blair has said it is possible to identify problem children who could grow up to be a potential “menace to society” even before they are born.
Setting out plans for state intervention to prevent babies born into high-risk families becoming problem teenagers of the future, the prime minister said teenage mothers could be forced to accept state help before giving birth, as part of a clampdown on antisocial behaviour.
Mr Blair defended the need for state intervention and said action could even be taken “pre-birth” if necessary as families with drug and alcohol problems were being identified too late. More>>

Death of the Kenya Dream?

Written for The East African (Nairobi)
July 31, 2006
By Parselelo Kantai (posted here with the author’s permission)

AT THE LAUNCH OF LOTTE HUGHES’s book, Moving the Maasai, Professor Bethwel Ogot stood up and declared the Kenyan project dead.

Ogot, the father of Kenyan history and Africa’s most celebrated historian, has spent most of his career writing Kenya into being. When he started out over 50 years ago, Africans were said to have no history. They lived in a continuous unconscious present, a land of perpetual childhood.

He challenged this racist assumption, traced the origins of many of the disparate peoples that occupied the Kenyan geographical space, forged links with the nationalists of the Independence era, promulgated and defended the project that was the Kenyan nation state.

And now here he was in the twilight of his career, presiding over a slice of imported sub-nationalist history.

Ogot’s sentiments reflect something that most Kenyans – especially those marginalised by, and in, the past – know but are afraid to talk about: that the idea of Kenya is a political fiction that will not bear close scrutiny. In fact, the official version of Kenya as born of a heroic armed struggle against colonialism is a narrative that automatically excludes them.

Them: at the top of that list is, in fact, the Mau Mau themselves – the armed strugglers. As Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson shows, the Mau Mau were losers in both war and peace: ‘Kenyatta had been asked about Mau Mau. His answer had been unequivocal: ‘We shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya- Mau Mau was a disease, which was eradicated and must never be remembered again.’

Independent Kenya was founded on a pact of forgetting the past – the spirit of Harambee. To achieve this, histories both collective and personal had to be swept under the national carpet; questions about how notorious collaborators, torturers from the Emergency era, had come to the centre of power were suppressed.

The drama of forging the nation was a single narrative in the continuous present tense – the narrative of Development. Any invocation of the past brought instant punishment, as the late Bildad Kaggia discovered.

Kaggia was the assistant minister for education and the MP for Kandara in then Fort Hall district. In September 1963, he wrote to the minister of agriculture, lands and settlement, Jackson Angaine, inquiring about the restoration of lands confiscated from the Mau Mau, “the freedom fighters who were then known as terrorists”.

In response, Angaine warned him against disrupting the ongoing government land resettlement programme: “Any attempt to disrupt the present consolidated areas- would lead to agricultural chaos, a grave setback to the economy and be in direct contravention of the spirit of Harambee whereby past differences are to be forgotten.” Kaggia, freedom fighter and detained with Kenyatta at Kapenguria, was persistent. It cost him his job – he was forced to resign over the issue – and earned him a lifelong tag of Public Enemy.

Nationalism was meant to be a transformative project. Like the missionary’s civilising mission before it, it would shake the tribe out of the nascent citizen, feed him on a diet of English and Kiswahili, wean him from poverty and disease. Successful, it would have been glorious vindication of the founding ethos, the national need for amnesia.

It was not successful. In fact, after a few earnest gestures, the nationalists themselves began to actively sabotage their own project. Broke when they inherited the state, they needed to eat. To do so, they formed networks of sub-nationalist privilege that operated on the principle that the tribe – and therefore the tribal patron at the centre – was the unstated vehicle of distribution of public resources. Nationalism became a byword for private accumulation.

ANY CONVERSATION of the past is therefore deeply uncomfortable. It is the closed realm in which the personal stories of an ageing political elite are too closely entwined with a public, collective history. Opening it up would force the wenye nchi into an accounting process that they would no doubt rather avoid (wenye nchi means they who own the country, as against wananchi, people of the country, ie, citizens).

Time is on their side, and history returns the second time as farce. It was perhaps a mark of how mysterious these histories had become – how thick the blanket of national amnesia that covered the past – that, soon after NARC came to power, the public was treated to a series of historical faux pas.

One of NARC’s first orders of business was the search for Dedan Kimathi’s grave – in order to exhume the Mau Mau leader’s remains and give him a hero’s burial. The writer Andia Kisia had a year before written a story with an alarmingly similar scenario. Called A Likely Story, she describes the search for Kimathi’s grave. It ends in farce. While digging around the Kamiti Prison grounds, it slowly becomes clear that nobody can actually remember where Kimathi was buried.

Fact proved as strange as fiction. In the event, a highly political event graced by Cabinet ministers, nobody could remember where he was buried. His bones have never been recovered.

Then a man was brought in from Ethiopia and presented to the public as the disappeared Mau Mau hero, General Stanley Mathenge. That act in itself, taking a survivor out the national closet – with all his pent-up secrets, his 50 years of anonymity – seemed to confirm that NARC’s victory over 40 years of Kanu rule was the key to opening up the past.

It was not to be. After a few nervous days in which he was presented to the public and then to his family (who tearfully embraced him) “General Mathenge” couldn’t take it any more. He revealed that he was actually Lemma Ayanu, an Ethiopian peasant farmer.

In perhaps an even more comical display of national amnesia, he was dispatched to the national laboratory and DNA-tested, then swiftly sent back to Ethiopia. The results were never publicly released, a little detail that betrayed the fact that the soul of the new regime was still as paranoid as the old one. And as if to emphasise that NARC was largely a collection of the same old wenye nchi in populist disguise, the promised exercise of opening up the past through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was quietly dropped.

But still. The fact that at least three books touching on Kenya’s colonial experience have been launched in Kenya in the space of 18 months would seem to suggest a limited admission of the need for a national conversation on the past. The launch in Nairobi of Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, The British Gulag by Caroline Elkins and Moving the Maasai by Lotte Hughes would not have been possible under either Kenyatta’s or Moi’s Kanu.

All these books are loaded with the seeds to plant Kenya’s fraught and tragic histories firmly in the present. They are, each one of them, highly successful experiments in a kind of forensic investigative history. They name names, they profile victims, they point accusing fingers.

In my heated imagination, I envisioned the wenye nchi scampering around for places to hide, hastily launching cover-ups, Commissions of Inquiry. Instead, the expected swords turned to ploughshares, only furrowing the ground of a dormant nationalist imagination. Among the invited guests to her book launch, Caroline Elkins had included the vice-president and the First Lady, both of whom declared the books tremendously useful, in the way that you would describe returned museum artefacts.

What had happened?

Two things, it seems to me. First, the nationalist moment has passed; the fervour with which the past could be used to flay the skins of the saboteurs of nationalism no longer exists. The past has lain under the carpet for so long, it seems to have rotted away and died. In its place is a growing sub-nationalist culture, in which the survivors of colonial injustice seek to point their victimhood in a more profitable direction: British courts and British society, both of which are writhing in the guilt of their imperial past, and which can be forced to pay for past sins.

Both the Mau Mau survivors and the Maasai activists are planning on making claims against the British government. In Andia Kisia’s A Likely Story, historical documents are missing. The protagonist, a man driven to frenzy by his search for the truth, soon discovers why. There is an official who is eating them. He catches him at it.

A similarly Kafkaesque culture of denial, disappearing and forgetting – as Maasai activists discovered when then lands minister Amos Kimunya told them to come back in 900 years if they wanted to reclaim their stolen lands in Laikipia – simply means that confronting the Kenyan state within the bounds of litigation and democracy is an exercise in futility. The Kenyan state only reacts to the vocabulary of mass mobilisation and violence. The Maasai discovered this quickly, when they demonstrated in 2004, attempting to reclaim Laikipia.

The second thing that happened is this: the books, all of them, are pointed in another direction. Their vitriol and indignation is part of an essentially British conversation about its colonial past. On the right of that conversation are those claiming the intrinsic good of Empire – its bequeathing of modernity to erstwhile savages. On the right are the likes of Hughes, Anderson and the American Elkins, who have uncovered British colonial frauds and crimes – the colonial swindle of the Maasai that paved way for British settlement in the White Highlands; the concentration camps and hangings that silenced the Mau Mau during the Emergency. Crimes that shatter the strangely enduring myth of “Empire as a good thing”, making British imperialism look like Nazi Germany.

In between right and left is, however, where the games begin – the contested territory of agency. Who speaks for the “subject races”, yesterday’s “savage natives”, today’s victim claimants? It is, as the writer Michela Wrong recently commented, ironical that the attacks on colonial infidelities and atrocities – on the white administrators who presided over the colonial project in Kenya and elsewhere – are coming from white Westerners:

We are white Westerners, which means that however we may empathise, however vicariously angry we may grow as we pore over old documents, ours remains an essentially intellectual interest. It wasn’t our ancestors who found their paths barred by prejudice, their lives shaped by laws and taxes devised by Africa’s uninvited guests.

It is a question fraught with Africa’s post-colonial contradictions. The collapse of the nationalist enterprise devalued such former prestige projects as research and, as said earlier, effectively silenced its more intrepid practitioners: the men and women detained and sent into exile for asking the most basic questions. The vacuum left has been filled by researchers in Western universities.

Their interest – in the subjects and the subject matter – may be intellectual, but that should not be confused with a benign interest. The territories they now possess are today in their way as valuable as imperialism’s most prized overseas possessions at the height of colonialism. And that doesn’t just refer to funding opportunities. By occupying this intellectual territory, Western academics in African studies departments are also managing perceptions – perceptions of what Africa is and how it can be engaged with.

People who import their histories are doomed by the failure of their own imaginations. Constantly acted upon, they will struggle with a lack of self-belief, and play out whatever roles are assigned to them without ever quite understanding their place in the world. This is the true meaning of “Third World”, the writer VS Naipaul’s “half-made places” that have failed to imagine themselves into an existence beyond the assignations of their former conquerors. The repossession of this territory is the new frontier for the African intellectual.

(c) Parselelo Kantai

The Rule of Law (you say you want it?)

From:
To: KCL SS&PP Students (University of London, King’s College)
Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2006 4:30:37 PM
Subject: DVD & video borrowing restriction

Dear all,
Please see the dull but important message below, which will principally
affect users at the Maughan Library.

************

Dear student,

We have recently implemented a borrowing restriction regarding the ISS
DVD/VHS collection.

In compliance with the Video Recording Act (VRA) 1984 the British
censor must classify (U, PG, 12, 15 or 18) every video or DVD
distributed in the UK. It is an offence (under Section 9) to supply a
video or DVD that hasn’t been classified unless it lies within a very
narrow class that escapes classification entirely. This class includes
sports and educational DVDs. ERA recordings (off-air) are also exempt.
Not all foreign imports have been classified, though those that have
had a theatrical release already will certainly have been rated.

It is also an offence to supply a DVD/video that does not feature the
correct certification labels (Section 13). No foreign imports will have
UK markings. Under the Act, the word “supply” is carefully defined and
it includes “letting on hire” or loaning, even for no reward.

Therefore, having consulted with the KCL Legal Compliance Team we can
no longer allow unclassified videos or DVDs to be removed from the
building (except for classroom teaching on prior authorisation).
However, they can be issued for viewing in the Library & ISC itself.
This use apparently escapes the statutory definition of “supply”. This
category of DVD and video now features a red reference card stating
where the item can be played as well as a short loan label, with the
last loan period ending at closing time.

We particularly wish to avoid any embarrassment or arguments at the
main counter and security gate so we would appreciate your co-operation
in this matter.

———————-
Information Specialist – Social Science & Public Policy
Information Services & Systems
King’s College London
Franklin-Wilkins Building
Waterloo Campus
London SE1 9NH

Less Kids in Africa Equals Better National Security for America

Jeffrey Sachs who leaps over tall buildings in Bolivia and Russia in a single bound and lands in Africa to solve its many problems is at it again (read article in Scientific American). Where he once promoted the power of unfettered markets, advising the Russians on the ’shock therapy’ that left a bulk of state assets in the hands of a cabal of crooks, he is now an environmental activist urging benign state intervention in economic development. His latest campaign involves helping the environment by helping poor people in Africa and the Middle East whose numbers are rising too fast according to this descendent of Thomas Malthus.

Allowing that people in the rich countries live on about $30,000 per year, well above the global average of $10,000, which itself is substantially more than most Africans consume and earn, his suggestion is that giving birth to less poor people is the best course of action in the future. Sachs is worried not about the suffering of the unborn poor should they live like their parents in scarcity and ill health but rather that they may actually manage to fulfill their economic aspirations. At present growth rates by 2050, according to UN forecasts (not usually worth the paper they are printed on by the way), world population will be 9 billion with 2.5 billion of this number born in the poor countries. If this ’surplus’ somehow finds a way to earn and consume today’s $10,000 average, it would by Sachs calculations cause untold environmental stresses especially due to the fact that cruel fate has chosen to locate ‘biodiversity hotspots’ among the unwashed masses. He worries of the unhappy fate of these hotspots especially since they are a critical part of the ‘Global biological heritage’ a phrase that irritates me to no end because it consigns our part of the world to a perpetual poverty only relieved by the trickle of Birkenstock wearing nature tourists and their cousins, gigolo hungry European grandmas in Mombasa. Our economies are not supposed to grow, or if they do only slowly, according to this view. The African the environmentalist would love to see come to be is a gentle soul who wants nothing more than to live in rude but serviceable shelter, to consume a little food he has grown in the small plot out back, provided it does not kill off that rare species of caterpillar, and who in all things is guided by the desire to live ’sustainably’. Sustainability for the west to be exact. Not for that African – who thank God will never be – access to the comfort and security that comes from building of wealth. They are going to have their nature even if it requires that they get rid of the hungry, ambitious, dare-to-want-to-survive poor’ – before they are born.

Sachs appeals to American national security and economic interest. His argument in summary is that the more poor there are the angrier the number of young men willing to take up arms against prosperous America. He bewails the Bush administration’s ‘religious right’ inspired refusal to support fertility control in the poorest countries. Better to invest in fertility control now he urges: it is the best use of dollars for a more militarily and economically secure future for America. He is kind enough to stress that this should be voluntary fertility programs. Heaven forbid that under the ambit of national security women and men in Africa should be led into little hospital rooms and rendered infertile. As usual Sachs is never one to pursue his arguments to their logical ends. Couched in his kindness is a kind of neo-eugenics: rid the world of the poor by ensuring that they do not give birth to more like themselves; we are running out of room for you especially if you are from the poor nations (which I read to mean brown nations.)

If it is really a matter of national security then under the present American administration’s pre-emptive doctrine against emerging threats, surely there is a need to limit the number of children that the poor have. Yes, this might be achieved by voluntary measures. But foremost will not be the issue of helping the volunteers improve their lives, it will be as was true in all eugenics programs, an attempt to protect ’society’ from the undesirables. It might appear to be a bit much for me to be comparing this kind of well-intentioned policy advocacy with the eugenics movement, but I believe that Sachs’ call folds neatly into those of a century ago and that once the more hysterical and less politically correct types make it, all will be much clearer to you poor, over-breeding buggers.

The humanitarians of the day are like the European missionaries of the nineteenth century, providing justifications for colonial misadventure ‘for the good of the poor, native blighter.’ They increasingly join their mission with the ‘imperial’ promotion of the west’s interests. So much so that western NGOs are now a critical tool in their military’s strategy, helping to blunt the impact of the bombs and bullets poured into a target population. It does not surprise me in the least that with the likes of Sachs running around aid agencies are increasingly being targeted as non-neutral in many battle grounds. The toothless and rudderless left to which Sachs is an honored member has become the sheep’s clothing for a hawkish, domineering constituency that needs fodder for its military adventures. What could be more convenient and humane than to save the poor from themselves while being able to pursue imperial goals clothed in the Good Samaritan’s robes?

In 1807, William Hazlit accused Malthus of making himself ‘conscience-keeper to the rich and great, especially to those of them who are not of a giving disposition, all in coining or at least popularizing for their use the magical phrase or formula ’surplus’ or ‘redundant’ population.’ Sachs too acts to promote the interests of the rich nations but, with a perpetual nod to political correctness and disingenuousness, he would rather he appeared to be regarded as promoting the interests of the poor themselves. He therefore urges the rich to give even more, despite much of this money coming to no good whatsoever and even being harmful in a lot of cases. The animating spirit of his ideas is a restless ambition to be counted first among the rich and great by opining as an expert on regions and matters where his knowledge is thin and mostly involves advocating policies that have been tried for decades and found wanting. Joined by the other hapless musketeers, Bono and Geldof, his is a media game joining concern for poverty with the celebrity bandwagon for the selfish pursuit of personal plaudits and the conscience cooling balm of the ‘feel good factor’. To hell with the poor made to swallow his bitter medicines no matter how ill it makes them.

As Samuel L. Jackson would say of Sachs: ‘How smart can he be? He’s peeing into the wind.’

On a Further Reading

Parselelo Kantai on the contested territory in writing and acting on history in Kenya, and the recent spate of books by white, western intellectuals decrying the oppressions suffered by Kenyans of various stripes under British colonialism.  One of them, Caroline Elkins (author of Britain’s Gulag) reviews Adam Robert’s The Wonga Coup, the story of a failed 2004 coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea led by British mercenary Simon Mann and part-financed by Mark Thatcher, former British PM Maggie Thatcher’s son.  Binyavanga Wainaina generously provides barbed pointers on How to Write About Africa – to hilarious effect.  When African Americans visit Africa, why are they considered white by some Africans?  James Campbell’s Middle Passages is a historical narrative of two centuries of African American journeying to Africa. 

In Kenya and Africa, the Christian church has grown by leaps and bounds.  What is behind this hunger for transcendental truth?  Kenyan missionary Patrick Mukholi sets out to save heathen souls in Oxford, England.  If you’re a man, it turns out that the cut could save your life.  And now there are queues outside the surgery room after studies suggest that a circumcised man is 60% less likely to contract HIV than his uncircumcised counterpart.

 

‘Arrest me not,’ Mel Gibson telleth the centurion, ‘for I owneth Malibu. And thou lookest a bit Jewish unto me.’ Sayeth the centurion, ‘Tell it to the procurator.’

On the War Front

Ah, peace. Who is it good for?

‘”In Afghanistan, Americans have all the wrist watches but Afghans have all the time.” The enemy will attempt to control the clock with the strategic intent of winning by not losing. He will use the clock to wear down American resolve. Management of the clock will allow him to use patience as a means to offset American superiority in killing power.’ So writes Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales (Ret.) who is looking to historian Alan Beyerchen’s touting of touchy-feely soldiering as the next great advance in the theory of war fighting.

Israeli soldiers engaged in urban battle no longer conceive of the city as the site of engagement but rather a medium of warfare. They are leading the way in the development of a new kind of approach to fighting in urban areas where most battles in the coming decades will be fought. The IDF in Nablus in 2002, as is increasingly the case today, aimed to use ‘none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares.’ So says architect Eyal Weizman who sees in ‘walking through walls’ tactics the coming together of post-structuralist thought and operational theory. Cutting edge military thinkers, many in Israel, are apparently eager to challenge their institution’s linear thinking, centralized planning and fixed concepts with thinking, and practice, that is consciously post structuralist and draws heavily on Foucault. At last it seems critical theorists just might earn themselves some Pentagon dollars.

Books

Steven Hahn reviews Eric Foner’s Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. At the heart of American freedoms is the history of Black America during the First Reconstruction. Eric Foner revises revisionism.

What if the history from which you draw ’self esteem’ were forged? Pride and mistaken identity.

John Updike tiptoes around Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun brings the Biafra War up close and personal. Chimamanda recognises that history happens to people, that it is in the details of lives that the broader canvas of history is understood. Add to that, the book is a page turner.

Prize Winning 419s: I’m blind, also have Diabetes Insipidus, and Diabetes Mellitus

I am a fan and historian of the 419 scam email. I have noticed lately that they seem to be getting better by the day. Now they are written (supposedly) by middle class families in England rather than the usual relative of deposed African dictators (usually West African.) AB & H will henceforth dedicate a prize to one 419 per week selected from those received in my inbox. This week’s winner is Phill Adams whose wife needs a holiday since they have spent all their money on taxi fares to hospital to treat his blindness, ‘Diabetes Insipidus, and Diabetes Mellitus.’ Phill’s real innovation on the 419 email is providing a website from which you can make a donation to his wife’s 2-week holiday. And his decision to go for the heart strings as opposed to greed. Good for you Phill.

Hello,
I’m sorry to bother you but I hope you could spare a few minuets,
I’ve had a lot of ill health and my wife betty has been with my thru out, a real help and support to me, I’m blind, also have Diabetes Insipidus , and Diabetes Mellitus, I’ve had loads of operations on my eyes, and other various operations , and a few years ago I slipped and shattered the bone in my left arm, I’ve had 3 ops on this arm to correct it I still have little use from it, and have to rely on my wife’s help this has put a lot of strain on my poor wife, We live in England and I’d love to beadle to take her on a holiday to Devon in the UK where we live she loves the place and hasn’t had a holiday for some years as most of our money goes on taxis to hospital for me as I cant get around on public transport, could you please help me to give my wife Betty a 2 week break and put a smile on her face by making a small donation of small amount. I know she would appreciate a break
Thank you for your time and if you do spare a little to help me by visiting the link below

www.wifesholiday.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
Many Man thanks for your donation
Phill

What do George Galloway, Five-Fingered Betty and Erica Jong Have in Common?

George ‘Gorgeous’ Galloway with his overly orange tan, shiny suits, ‘indefatigable’ love of the spotlight and praises for Saddam Hussein is not my usual cup of tea but that man can do an interview. There is little that is better on TV than to watch Galloway tear a hapless interviewer to bits. Watch this clip on Sky News.

Earlier this morning I run across a brutally delicious review of Erica Jong’s latest effort ‘Seducing the Demon’ which I probably will not read after such a flaying. When in primary school, I would save my lunch money and buy a used book every Friday at a small used bookstore in Hurlingham (which I recently discovered still plies its trade.) It was there – at the age of ten if I remember right – that I came across Jong’s Fear of Flying. I was initially attracted to the title with its promise of airplanes and pilots. But as I flipped through its pages I came across the sex: fevered ‘zipless fucks’ that roused me to no end. And for some years afterward, while the book was in my possession, the pages with the sex scenes were worn from continual reference. It delivered almost as good value for the money as Nick Carter, the spy whose third testicle was a mini-nuke, or Slocum the gunfighter.

Some years ago, as my mother was turning fifty, and, I think quite scared if her frequent laments were any indication, I bought her Jong’s Fear of Fifty. My reasoning was that the book must surely be about life continuing after this watershed, perhaps even of a life that is more sensual and satisfying. She never did tell me what she thought of it and I had forgotten my gift until I came across this review in the Atlantic Monthly. The gift I fear may have plunged her into an even greater depression. What is it do you think that explains such narcissism which seems to be the almost inevitable destination of baby boomer writers?

The mind being what it is, my remembering reading the Fear of Flying inevitably casts me to the (embarrasing) subject of self love. Or to five-fingered Betty as I heard this relationship with the self referred to when I got to college in the States. The former (or perhaps still-going-strong Marxists) at Spiked, the UK online magazine, have been taking dead aim at the ‘politics of self’ or politics emptied of all content except the narcissism that Erica Jong seems to exemplify. Frank Furedi in an essay on ‘Europe’s very first ‘Masturbate-a-Thon’ event’ shreds the state’s outing of five-fingered Betty. The very same Britain that is today celebrating masturbation as the ultimate self love was a hundred years ago gripped in a hysteria that it was responsible for the weakening of their empire as it presumably had the Roman one…

A Son of the Soil in Khartoum

I am in Khartoum and I need a drink. Badly. But there are none to be had here or at least in no place that I know. Most women are covered up demurely which only seems to raise my curiosity rather than diminishing it. This is my first time here and so far of all the trips I have taken so far this year, I have yet to encounter better hosts. In every office I have gone to, I have been given something memorable to eat or drink. There is a laid back feel to the place and graciousness to the people that put me immediately at ease.

The city itself sprawls over a large area with very few high buildings. Many are clay colored, like the desert, and have wide spaces between them which lends the city a sense of unfettered freedom which clashes somewhat with the careful covering of body and hair by many of the women. The avenues are wide: a runner’s paradise as I discovered this morning when I took what is becoming a small tradition in every city I visit. Unlike cities like Addis Ababa or Copenhagen where the sight of me running attracts a certain amount of attention, people in Khartoum just seem to take it in their stride even though I did not meet any other runners. There are new cars everywhere, and new buildings on the rise, this is a boom city. Oil may be a curse further to the south of the country but here in Khartoum it most definitely a blessing.

The situation in Darfur scarcely seems impact this city. To be here, you would never imagine that there could be such intense suffering in some other part of the country. Politically, one of the more striking sights is of the numerous posters of John Garang on buildings and street lights. In the few conversations I have had with ordinary folk on the peace with the SPLM, I have felt that there was a genuine desire for peace. But will it last I wonder? Should South Sudan opt to secede during the 2011 referendum, I wonder if the peace will be maintained. I hope I get to see more of the country, especially the South. Sudan has always loomed large in my imagination and yet I find that I am so deeply ignorant of it and its complexities.

I remember when I was just about five or six, I would take down the world atlas and insist that my mother play a find-the-place game with me. She would usually pick towns and cities close to Nairobi and I, believing that she would try and go for some distant, obscure town, would start my search in the furthest corners of what was then the Soviet Union. Once or twice she picked Khartoum. When it was pointed out to me (when on the verge of tears of frustration I may add), I would run my finger along the Nile all the way north through Egypt to Cairo. So how surreal it was to stand at the intersection of the White and Blue Nile never having imagined that fate would conspire to bring me here. To see the different currents, the differing colors and to be told that the waters from the two rivers even taste different.

More later.

From the Land of the blondes to that of the Two Niles

I left Copenhagen a few days ago and find that my experience of that city was quite underwhelming even without having expected much on arrival. Perhaps it is because I was there for too short a time to appreciate anything more than its architecture and its tourist face. But even on the level of the gut, I only felt a mild stimulation and it usually takes me a very short time to appreciate the pulse of a city. This pulse, when faced with the foreigner, especially the African, beats fast from hostility and defensiveness. The Africans that I met there told me horrific stories of the racism and xenophobia that they had suffered since their arrival. Their variety of stories had in common an inward looking Danish culture that feels vulnerable to the outsider while simultaneously feeling superior to him.

A Ghanaian professor who took his doctorate from the University of Copenhagen and later taught at the same school told me of students who walked out during his introductory class: they refused to be taught by an African, thinking that there was no possible way he could be qualified. He would start his classes with the painful joke that he ‘had not come to play music.’ This was said to me with a laugh but I could tell that it still hurt him all these years later. He observed that early in his sixteen-year stay Copenhagen, he was criticized for not speaking Danish. Immigrants had to integrate into this new society and learning the language was the first and most important step. But once this was done, he said, the charge became that skilled migrants like him were there to take jobs from the locals. It is the same refrain heard in many European countries that reflects a fear of a world that those same countries have benefited so much from by trading with or conquering it in the past.

A Nigerian taxi driver told me repeatedly of the slurs that he had suffered there, the provocations. The Cartoon Controversy according to him was less an assertion of free speech than a much publicized provocation that all those who are not white and Danish feel in their new home. It seemed a great shame that a society so accomplished would lack confidence to the extent that it fears people who are merely seeking a brighter future for themselves. But let me not make it seem like all was doom and gloom.

The Danes know cocktails. I had the best margarita of my life there: the phi phi. The magic ingredient in it is chili so that the slight burn of the tequila as it went down my throat was followed by the warmth of the spice. The lounge in which I had numerous phi phis was like a million others in any major city that you care to go to. It had low lighting, jazzy music playing and a hum of conversation at the exact pitch and volume as New York or Nairobi or London. There is a convergence of desire I have been arguing to all and sundry, a decades-long rise of an urban elite that is essentially global in its outlook. And it is this very elite that I think can be argued, even without the benefit of the phi phi, to be managing the convergence of state norms and operations. This has led, especially in Europe, to governments that appear cut off from popular consensus and drawing their legitimacy from a kind of internationalist elite worldview. It is the calm cover to a roiling and boiling sea.

There is a tradition of gift giving to the state and the country in Denmark that fascinates me. The queen’s residence is four palaces contributed by seventeenth century merchants. They face – across a small body of water – the city’s opera house which was built for half a billion dollars contributed by Mærsk Møller of Maersk shipping fortune. I wonder why this same tradition has not taken root in Kenya. Perhaps it is because the way the idea of the public space is constituted is as a trough from which to grab wealth and not to deposit it. You take from the center, a center that no-one seems to believe that they occupy (you will notice that Kenyan politicians and bigwigs wear a perpetual cloak of victimhood and a sense of operating from the margins.)

For the days I spent in Copenhagen, I run every morning. And got lost each time. Running in a new city tells you a lot about it. In New York for example, where I lived for some years, runners will nod to each other. I used to feel free to sidle up to a fast running one and ask whether we could push each other. The answer was invariably an enthusiastic yes. But in Copenhagen, I felt watched and suspected of some crime. Perhaps I was just a surprising sight. But in a city with pretensions of sophistication, I felt like I was in a rural town, what with the wide-eyed ‘who are you?’ stares and the averted ‘I am not seeing you’ gaze.

Next post is on Khartoum, Sudan where I have been for the past twelve hours.

Up North in the Land of the Blondes

Back to the land of high-speed wireless internet. Otherwise known as heaven. I must post about Copenhagen even if it is only about my initial impressions which are shrouded in a heavy fog of ignorance. Before I do that though, do you believe that there is such a thing as destiny when you meet people? On the flight from Alexandria to Heathrow, I met an architect from Oslo who specializes in building villas from the simplest materials who was coming from her project in Ethiopia. It was just as I was thinking of having a small place somewhere in the Rift Valley that I could visit when I am in Kenya and need to get away from it all. Well, after a long conversation on books, the relative merits of one duty-free perfume versus the other, we started plotting a villa that would be cheap and made very simply. Watch this space since if this plan, which I have had with a few friends of mine gets underway, I intend to blog every single step of building my own little out-of-town heaven

It took just under two hours to fly here from London but no two airports or cities seem more different. Heathrow of course is much bigger and perhaps because of that is so much more impersonal. Full of grey carpeting and scowling staff while you step off your plane onto parquet floor in Copenhagen, and it a much friendlier and intimate space. Instead of taking a taxi to my hotel I took the train to the city’s central station. Because night had fallen by the time I landed, I could see very little as I pulled up to the Copenhagen Strand. But I had to get something to eat and decided to do some late night foraging.

Map in shameful (I need to consider myself a traveler not a tourist) hand, I walked to Amager Torv, a square I was told has restaurants that serve food late into the night. The streets were quite empty of walkers and cars but I felt no sense of threat or nervousness despite never having been here before. I felt no surprise, no sense of revelation as I walked. The streets just as I expected had cobblestones and the buildings were a mix of the sleekly modern and older styles that I felt that I had seen before in many other European cities. In Europe surprise seems to have been packaged into a restrained charm. In place: obedient to the whole. The more I see of the continent’s cities compared to those in my part of the world, East Africa and the Horn, I become more convinced that it is the westerner who is the more communal being than the African despite the present wisdom which holds the opposite view. Here there is a rigid social and historical skeleton – especially writ in the architecture – underneath individual individuality. The few people I met in their variety of funky styles seemed in a way to be unable to break out from the unmoving solidity of the buildings leaning over them. This town, like the others I have seen in Europe, seems to constantly remind its citizens that IT and not them are what is enduring and worthy of that continuity.

Nairobi in contrast is a city of its people. Its physical manifestation pales in comparison. (This is half the problem if we are assessing the city’s many problems.) In a very real way in Nairobi people are the institutions, they are the buildings. That is what makes all the dirt and the poverty and the crime there co-exist with a sense of vitality that once you have tasted is very difficult to stay away from or to replicate anywhere else. Anyway, back to Copenhagen.

I had an excellent steak at Pasta Basta just after 2 am in the morning. Wonder what talented chef agrees to keep such late hours. The tables around me were filled. One notably with a group of young men who were painfully thin, had clearly drunk an enormous amount of beer if their loud shouts of laughter were any clue and who I imagined were musicians discussing their latest road trip. Another table had two women, one who kept getting up to go out of the restaurant to take mobile phone calls. She would return and they would immediately plunge into bitter condemnations (they were speaking in english) of some guy who clearly kept calling just as his rival was sending texts. Her companion, clearly the loyal support during some kind of break-up drama, kept nodding along seemingly agreeing with every rant that emerged from the other’s mouth. It was such a universal scene. I imagined that on the other side of the phone was a guy also seating in a bar with a friend who was was also nodding along in agreement at whatever analysis his injured buddy made about the mobile calls. Love, as wonderful and teary in Copenhagen as it is elsewhere. The few people I have seen so far in the city by the way are very physically attractive: fit and tanned and energetic.

Walking back to the hotel, I got lost and walked for over an hour before I finally found my way. At some point, at a distant, I saw a group of about ten youths (yuuuthhss or yuuts as Joe Pesci would say) milling about next to the canal. Behind me was a man pushing along his bike. It was the first time all evening that I felt nervous. I suddenly wondered about all the stories I have read on neo-Nazi attacks on Africans. Though I can remember hearing of none in this city, the closer I came to them, enough to see that they were observing me closely, the more nervous I got. Yet I felt unable to turn back the way I came and there were no side streets to turn into. Besides, I told myself, they had me in their sights now and if it was indeed going to come to some late-night violence, my turning down a darkened road might have made the whole matter worse. My imagination, which is ever coming up with one unlikely scenario after another, by this time was serving up horrible images of what was to come. Bloody images of yuuts tearing cobblestones off the pavement and using them to bludgeon me unconscious before throwing me into the canal. Or of me grabbing a brick from the side of the road and charging toward screaming in inarticulate rage and terror. I must confess that my eyes, as they seem to always do in situations where I suspect the slightest physical threat, searched frantically for a weapon. It is this fear of mine for violence which lends me to believe that the coward is possibly the most violent human being there can be. His fear of others allows him leeway to commit terrible crimes to assure his safety. In any case, the kids were probably just as curious about me as I them. As I passed by slowly they ceased talking so that it felt that I was inspecting a kind of Danish teenage parade of soldiers armed with skateboards and pocket keychains.

That was my first day in Copenhagen. More to come if I can work up the stamina to seat in front of this keyboard when it is summer outside.

The rudeness quotient for Copenhagen (with 1 as very polite and kind, and 10 as boorish and unwelcoming) on day 1 is a 5 since what I have experienced in my interactions so far is a politeness that emanates more from efficient professionalism than voluntary hospitality. The score may change by the time I skip town this weekend.

George Bush and Superman: Naked and Powerless?

Powerful people are not powerful: they are fumblers and jivers as we used to call them back in the day. I say this after two events: George Bush’s antics during the G8 and the latest Superman movie.

Consider this slice of the off-the-cuff conversation between Bush and Blair in Russia:

Bush: I think Condi [US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] is going to go pretty soon.

Blair: But that’s, that’s, that’s all that matters. But if you… you see it will take some time to get that together.

Bush: Yeah, yeah.

Blair: But at least it gives people…

Bush: It’s a process, I agree. I told her your offer to…

Blair: Well… it’s only if I mean… you know. If she’s got a…, or if she needs the ground prepared as it were… Because obviously if she goes out she’s got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.

Blair’s words cut to the core of Britain’s role in the world: his desire now is only to present Downing Street as a relevant force, as ‘powerful’. Yet all he can do is ’speak’ as he runs ahead of actors so that he can seem to have an impact on events – to be part of the doing in the Middle East and elsewhere, . How helpless, how sad that this man who occupies such a supremely self-conceited office should be revealed to be so…irrelevant. This is a truth that the world is catching on fast. In Kenya for example, the British diplomatic effort is sputtering. No longer can the ambassador stroll into State House as he wishes. The impulse at home is to deal with those with the best power PR machines, those who retain some ability to act decisively. But that too is where the rubber gets off the road because even the ‘powerful’ ones engage in conversations like this:

(Since the camera is not focused on him, it is not clear whom Bush is talking to, but possibly Chinese President Hu Jintao, a guest at the G8 summit.)

Bush: “Gotta go home. Got something to do tonight. Go to the airport, get on the airplane and go home. How about you? Where are you going? Home?

Bush: “This is your neighborhood. It doesn’t take you long to get home. How long does it take you to get home?”

(Reply is inaudible.)

Bush: “Eight hours? Me too. Russia’s a big country and you’re a big country.”

(At this point, the president seems to bring someone else into the conversation.)

Bush: “It takes him eight hours to fly home.”

(He turns his attention to a server.)

Bush: “No, Diet Coke, Diet Coke.”

(He turns back to whomever he was talking with.)

Bush: “It takes him eight hours to fly home. Eight hours. Russia’s big and so is China.”

That’s what power does when it is not posturing before the microphones. Its use of violence is really just an attempt to hide its confusion, its fear of having been told that it is in control when all it really wants is a diet coke and to get home in time for bed.

The age of kings, at least due to the divine link it claimed for its highest, could make a PR stab at claiming supernatural control of events. But in this secular age, where the pressure on leaders is to remain ‘in control’, they must manage the image of control more than controlling events themselves which they know is beyond them. It is this PR aspect of leadership that leads to the greatest use of violence and oppression because the one thing you can at least appear to control is taking aim at a body, pulling a trigger or imposing some draconian measure on it. So just watch out when you demand that your leaders ‘do something’ about a major crisis. Violence often follows.

Power: do you think Superman the son of Krypton had it? Having just watched Superman Returns, the atrociously boring latest chapter, I am ashamed to say that as a kid I used to love the dude. He was all that was right with the world: justice and the victory of supermen over ordinary men which for some reason as kids in Kenya we really went in for. Perhaps this was because, as I have come to reluctantly suspect, deep inside the Kenyan middle class breast burns a secret, little colonial fire of white love and an unacknowledged hatred of the underdog despite being constantly told that you are one. How could I have ever related to Superman? He was invulnerable to everything except Kryptonite; could fly ‘faster than a speeding bullet’; leap over tall buildings; and even turn back time. So what did he choose to do with these powers? He ignored all that was going wrong in the world except for small-time crooks mugging little old ladies who he punched out or wrapped in a light pole to my great delight. I cannot now understand why I considered him a hero when in fact nothing could physically hurt him. This echoes my curiosity about how exactly is America so often able to think itself a victim of bullies when it is the most militarily and economically powerful country on earth. True Americans have been hurt by outsiders in the past, but I am increasingly astonished by this ability of the powerful to claim perpetual victimhood and the mantle of heroism when they react against the ‘bully’. It seems to me that most atrocities – whether in Haifa or Beirut for example – are always committed by ‘victims’. Even Superman becomes a victim of Lex Luther whose great crime is his madness in refusing to lie down and accept that the Man of Steel is his and humanity’s natural master.

Victim. The competition to append to yourself this word, and therefore own justifications for your actions, is the stuff of every strain of politics and ideology. From progressive to reactionary, democrat to republican, the search for victimhood is on. The winner gets to kill and maim with impunity.

From comments page:

alexcia: When bushie first came to power, there was alot of concern about whether and how his low regard for intellectual rigour would impact the US.
No one is concerned anymore, no they are numbed with shock from the realization that with him, and indeed most of america, Intelligence, low or otherwise does not matter. Who needs all that when you have WILL power, when you can read souls and when god speaks to you directly.

MMK: Intellectual rigour, the lack or presence of it, is the least of the problem. The real problem in my mind is with the issue of control: the attempt to present leadership as somehow a force that can control events and plot the future with unerring accuracy on the policy and moral front. Another word for what I am trying to point out is hubris. The US has steadily bowed to the dais of science and technology which in effect are about attempting to understand nature so as to control and direct it for human purposes. Its triumphs in this sphere have in the best enlightenment tradition been inferred to be relevant in political leadership and human management as well. The thinking being if you can create all those bits of tech and bio-tech and wealth built on science, then leadership too must bow to scientific exactitude and certainty.

Anonymous said…

Victimhood is the ultimate superiority. The victim is the moral superior, the victim is the superior when it comes to initiative- no one may question why they do something, after all they are victims.

Victimhood is the aspiration of all human beings, why else do we claim it was someone else’s fault each time we find ourselves in a bit of trouble.

Victimhood takes away responsibility. If someone did something bad to me, the the world is less shocked if my reaction to the act is brutal, callous and inhuman, after all, my victimisation made me vulnerable to such extremes.

Victimhood is a tool in politics as well as in personal relations. Women who stay in abusive relationships do so because, at a deeper psychological level, victimhood gives them a sense of moral superiority to the abuser. A sense of “see how courageous and loving I can be despite all the does to me, see how much I persevere!”

Victimhood is the ultimate symptom of the key malaise in human societies, a desire to avoid 100% responsibility over our actions, the consequences and the future.v

(Friday, August 18, 2006 2:58:39 PM)

The Headbutt From Heaven and How Zizou Rocked

It was perfect wasn’t it? The moment that Zinedine headbutted Materazzi the curtain parted and revealed the immigrant’s European journey. I did not have a moment of doubt that Materazzi had made a racist comment: that he had somehow managed to bring up the subject of Zizou’s Algerian origins in a derogatory fashion, which indeed turned out to be the case. And I celebrated wildly that Zizou had chosen to openly and violently refuse to endure such insult. He did not sneakily get back at his tormentor. No, it was his final game and he was going to play it on his terms – using his rules. No more taking of a high moral ground that in reality means self abasement or a turning of the other cheek only to have it struck as well.

He had endured this kind of thing before. Listened to the Jean-Marie Le Pen’s and other racists deride the team of immigrants he led to victory in 1998. He had grown up with the knowledge of France’s brutal colonial war in Algeria; of the racist limitations to Algerian immigrant aspirations. His millions in income and his fame did not insulate him from the knowledge that his society prized him as a football player and little else. Zizou held hands with any immigrant who has stolidly endured racist insult to try and fit into their new society while trying to achieve their goals. And so when he unleashed that headbutt, the millions who had just taken their commuter trains to whatever nasty neighborhood they live in, under the baleful stare of the police and the sneers and jeers of many of their new countrymen leaned into Materazzi’s chest with him. I felt elated that this man who had bestrode the world stage and received its every honor had chosen instead, with premeditation and commitment, to refuse to take that shit anymore. He did it when it mattered, as billions watched and with the biggest sporting prize within reach. That is why Zizou for me has taken his place with the likes of Mohammed Ali and Joe Louis in being much more than a sporting icon. In his final game he rejected the role we want for him – refused to just play and shut up – and instead decided to be his own man.

But this post really would not be complete without a celebration of the mechanics of that headbutt. The way he jumped into it without hesitation. The decision to aim for the chest and not the head which displayed a brilliant understanding of the mechanics of surprise and forward movement during an attack. If you ever attend a Vee Arnis Jitsu class in New York City (as I did for some years before I left for London), you will realize that you have to move forward on the attack. That in fact your safety, in a manner of speaking, is behind the man in front of you and that you have to get through him to find it. Zizou understood this well. He might have gotten the red card and France did lose the game, but I think that his wellbeing, his sense of having stood for himself, lay behind Marco Materazzi who he went through. Like a hot knife through butter.

What would have happened had Zizou chosen to teach Materazzi some further lessons? Clearly the stomp would have come into play. In fact that was the natural follow through to that headbutt. But let me not get gory or sink too low because in fact Zizou did not want to hurt the guy. It was more to show Materazzi that while he coveted the trophy enough to dishonor himself by making racist comment, he, Zizou, thought that the prize was not worth his honor.

(Check out a delicious post by Daniel Davies on the (sublime headbutt)

The Headbutt From Heaven and How Zizou Rocked

It was perfect wasn’t it? The moment that Zinedine headbutted Materazzi the curtain parted and revealed the immigrant’s European journey. I did not have a moment of doubt that Materazzi had made a racist comment: that he had somehow managed to bring up the subject of Zizou’s Algerian origins in a derogatory fashion, which indeed turned out to be the case. And I celebrated wildly that Zizou had chosen to openly and violently refuse to endure such insult. He did not sneakily get back at his tormentor. No, it was his final game and he was going to play it on his terms – using his rules. No more taking of a high moral ground that in reality means self abasement or a turning of the other cheek only to have it struck as well.

He had endured this kind of thing before. Listened to the Jean-Marie Le Pen’s and other racists deride the team of immigrants he led to victory in 1998. He had grown up with the knowledge of France’s brutal colonial war in Algeria; of the racist limitations to Algerian immigrant aspirations. His millions in income and his fame did not insulate him from the knowledge that his society prized him as a football player and little else. Zizou held hands with any immigrant who has stolidly endured racist insult to try and fit into their new society while trying to achieve their goals. And so when he unleashed that headbutt, the millions who had just taken their commuter trains to whatever nasty neighborhood they live in, under the baleful stare of the police and the sneers and jeers of many of their new countrymen leaned into Materazzi’s chest with him. I felt elated that this man who had bestrode the world stage and received its every honor had chosen instead, with premeditation and commitment, to refuse to take that shit anymore. He did it when it mattered, as billions watched and with the biggest sporting prize within reach. That is why Zizou for me has taken his place with the likes of Mohammed Ali and Joe Louis in being much more than a sporting icon. In his final game he rejected the role we want for him – refused to just play and shut up – and instead decided to be his own man.

But this post really would not be complete without a celebration of the mechanics of that headbutt. The way he jumped into it without hesitation. The decision to aim for the chest and not the head which displayed a brilliant understanding of the mechanics of surprise and forward movement during an attack. If you ever attend a Vee Arnis Jitsu class in New York City (as I did for some years before I left for London), you will realize that you have to move forward on the attack. That in fact your safety, in a manner of speaking, is behind the man in front of you and that you have to get through him to find it. Zizou understood this well. He might have gotten the red card and France did lose the game, but I think that his wellbeing, his sense of having stood for himself, lay behind Marco Materazzi who he went through. Like a hot knife through butter.

What would have happened had Zizou chosen to teach Materazzi some further lessons? Clearly the stomp would have come into play. In fact that was the natural follow through to that headbutt. But let me not get gory or sink too low because in fact Zizou did not want to hurt the guy. It was more to show Materazzi that while he coveted the trophy enough to dishonor himself by making racist comment, he, Zizou, thought that the prize was not worth his honor.

(Check out a delicious post by Daniel Davies on the (sublime headbutt)

Tusker Beers and Daddy

My oh my, I have not blogged for the past two weeks. It is because I have been actually trying to get my running going (not going very well I must say), working and writing, all which has left me absolutely exhausted and strangely blog-mute if you know what I mean. My life on the road continued this past week when I flew to Nairobi for the weekend. Now I am in Cape Town for the first time in my life. More on that later.

Nairobi. You know you are in Kenya when the first conversation you have is on politics and for this year, precisely what are the odds of this politician or that one rising to the presidency during the 2007 elections. Politics in Kenya is nothing more than a long-running soap opera. In fact, if there is one thing that more democratic government and a free press have brought Kenyans it is a great improvement in the quality of entertainment. Kenyans speak of their politicians with the kind of affection you might have for Jim Carrey. Except that these are Jim Carreys whose comedic qualities carry a certain tragic tinge to them. As in there is a painful price to pay for your laughter. I kept hearing the same phrase of ’so and so politician is powerful, but he is less powerful than he was last year’ over and over again, and I thought of how often I have heard it without quite understanding what it means in essence. Where does power dwell in Kenya, the president’s power for instance? This problem was subjected to the Nairobi political classroom otherwise known as the bar.

No, I suggested between sips of cold Tusker beers, it is not in the guns since at any one gven time there are only a few of the 30 million Kenyans who are directly threatened with violence from not opposing whatever nasty measures our presidents have foistered on us. Of course the threat of that violence in the ‘bad old days’ was probably enough to stay the tongue and actions of most citizens who were in opposition. But then what was it that bound that enormous coercive apparatus to one man? Was it just money, patronage and fear?

No, I actually think that President Moi’s and Kenyatta’s power was nestled in fatherhood. We called them, in one nauseating praise song after the other, baba wa taifa (father of the nation.) That is what they were; those were not just idle words. Where else would power nestle and operate out of in Kenya if not from the depths of family power relations. The country is too disparate, its history of centralised state administration too brief and fleeting and the state’s means of violence quite modest at best. There was no history of a Kenyan nation with its narratives of a leadership whose legitimate position was traceable to a history peculiar to that nation. The British ruled us under the pretext of civilising us, improving our lot and old-fashioned violence. What about those who took over after them, especially in State House, what soil would they seek to plant their ‘power’ over people? I think it was quite simple really. Power or influence or control, whatever word you want to use, is encountered first and foremost in the home. Daddy and mummy have it, you know it from the first moment your mouth seeks a milk-filled breast and when your father unleashes a little violence your way, or perhaps your mother’s way just to show who is in charge. That was and is the case for every single Kenyan community.

Our presidents without fail justified their position, and the liberties they took with our freedoms and bodies, on their taking over the British mission to improve our ‘traditional’ selves and since they could not depend on the same soil to plant their power seed as had been planted in Britain, they took on the mantle of Father. The one power relation that every single Kenyan understood and had experienced from his earliest age. They were the kings and we were their children. That is why they managed to rule over us so successfully for so long.

Many of the cries for comment from the ever-silent, sphinx-like Kibaki, are really just calls for Father to speak. Many of us are discomfited by the silence emanating from where previously authority was nestled. We wonder why he is not in control. We begin to admire Moi with the benefit of hindsight. And always as we reminisce selectively, we marvel at how much he controlled, how he never suffered fools, his mastery over us. My suspicion is that Kibaki’s essential problem is that he is too lazy and aloof to play Father and therefore his power seems to be rooted in little other than our collective memory of serekali (government) and his ability to seem slightly above the bottom of the barrel crab war that is the soap opera of Kenyan politics. I will come back to this later, I am being rushed out of the room. Now I am off to the Cape Town waterfront for the first time.

Tusker Beers and Daddy

My oh my, I have not blogged for the past two weeks. It is because I have been actually trying to get my running going (not going very well I must say), working and writing, all which has left me absolutely exhausted and strangely blog-mute if you know what I mean. My life on the road continued this past week when I flew to Nairobi for the weekend. Now I am in Cape Town for the first time in my life. More on that later.

Nairobi. You know you are in Kenya when the first conversation you have is on politics and for this year, precisely what are the odds of this politician or that one rising to the presidency during the 2007 elections. Politics in Kenya is nothing more than a long-running soap opera. In fact, if there is one thing that more democratic government and a free press have brought Kenyans it is a great improvement in the quality of entertainment. Kenyans speak of their politicians with the kind of affection you might have for Jim Carrey. Except that these are Jim Carreys whose comedic qualities carry a certain tragic tinge to them. As in there is a painful price to pay for your laughter. I kept hearing the same phrase of ’so and so politician is powerful, but he is less powerful than he was last year’ over and over again, and I thought of how often I have heard it without quite understanding what it means in essence. Where does power dwell in Kenya, the president’s power for instance? This problem was subjected to the Nairobi political classroom otherwise known as the bar.

No, I suggested between sips of cold Tusker beers, it is not in the guns since at any one gven time there are only a few of the 30 million Kenyans who are directly threatened with violence from not opposing whatever nasty measures our presidents have foistered on us. Of course the threat of that violence in the ‘bad old days’ was probably enough to stay the tongue and actions of most citizens who were in opposition. But then what was it that bound that enormous coercive apparatus to one man? Was it just money, patronage and fear?

No, I actually think that President Moi’s and Kenyatta’s power was nestled in fatherhood. We called them, in one nauseating praise song after the other, baba wa taifa (father of the nation.) That is what they were; those were not just idle words. Where else would power nestle and operate out of in Kenya if not from the depths of family power relations. The country is too disparate, its history of centralised state administration too brief and fleeting and the state’s means of violence quite modest at best. There was no history of a Kenyan nation with its narratives of a leadership whose legitimate position was traceable to a history peculiar to that nation. The British ruled us under the pretext of civilising us, improving our lot and old-fashioned violence. What about those who took over after them, especially in State House, what soil would they seek to plant their ‘power’ over people? I think it was quite simple really. Power or influence or control, whatever word you want to use, is encountered first and foremost in the home. Daddy and mummy have it, you know it from the first moment your mouth seeks a milk-filled breast and when your father unleashes a little violence your way, or perhaps your mother’s way just to show who is in charge. That was and is the case for every single Kenyan community.

Our presidents without fail justified their position, and the liberties they took with our freedoms and bodies, on their taking over the British mission to improve our ‘traditional’ selves and since they could not depend on the same soil to plant their power seed as had been planted in Britain, they took on the mantle of Father. The one power relation that every single Kenyan understood and had experienced from his earliest age. They were the kings and we were their children. That is why they managed to rule over us so successfully for so long.

Many of the cries for comment from the ever-silent, sphinx-like Kibaki, are really just calls for Father to speak. Many of us are discomfited by the silence emanating from where previously authority was nestled. We wonder why he is not in control. We begin to admire Moi with the benefit of hindsight. And always as we reminisce selectively, we marvel at how much he controlled, how he never suffered fools, his mastery over us. My suspicion is that Kibaki’s essential problem is that he is too lazy and aloof to play Father and therefore his power seems to be rooted in little other than our collective memory of serekali (government) and his ability to seem slightly above the bottom of the barrel crab war that is the soap opera of Kenyan politics. I will come back to this later, I am being rushed out of the room. Now I am off to the Cape Town waterfront for the first time.

Destination Djibouti

My brother and I have been in Djibouti for the past six hours or so and I am already in love with the city. In the first place, after more than fifteen winters in the US and the UK, there is nothing I enjoy better than extreme, humid heat. To celebrate, I foolishly went out for a run this afternoon in the 40 degrees plus heat. Of course after a few steps, I settled on a sluggish walk about the city. It is beautiful: Moorish architecture, wide, clean streets and a long, curving driveway along a beautiful Red Sea beach. How strangely the future can turn out. If you had told me that I would be here six months ago I would have said you were insane. I am here with my brother who is all of 22 years old and studying astrophysics just outside London. He is one of the better travel companions I have ever had even though he keeps trying to get me to understand why string theory should excite me when I cannot even get beyond the fulcrum. But he makes such a good counterpoint to me on the road with his soft touch and polite manner when I can sometimes tend to be a bit barky and anxious. We are here through Thursday and I am already sorry to be leaving. More details tomorrow and possibly even some photos.

48 Hours and Counting

Ok, I have been in town for the last two days and I am hoping that I could spend a lot more time here in the future. I just returned from having an amazing dinner at a restaurant called 7 Freres. Our host recommended we have fresh fish baked in a clay oven and smeared in spices and lemon. On the side was roti bread, honey and pounded, ripe banana which we washed down with cold beer. Then we followed a huge crowd making its way to the People’s Palace (if I remember the name right) where there is an open air concert being held by a Congolese lingala band.

Djibouti is a country that feels like it is on the brink of getting wealthy. One of its great boons is the standoff between Eritrea and Ethiopia which has made the latter unwilling or able to use its traditional Eritrean port. Perhaps more importantly, the government officials with whom I have had a chance to interact seem keenly conscious of their duty to facilitate the trading desire of their people and take advantage of the country’s strategic position in the Red Sea. Then the large French and American military bases are a huge revenue earner though there is clearly a social price being paid by having thousands of heavily muscled, horny and aggressive young men with money rampaging about.

More later…

Destination Djibouti

My brother and I have been in Djibouti for the past six hours or so and I am already in love with the city. In the first place, after more than fifteen winters in the US and the UK, there is nothing I enjoy better than extreme, humid heat. To celebrate, I foolishly went out for a run this afternoon in the 40 degrees plus heat. Of course after a few steps, I settled on a sluggish walk about the city. It is beautiful: Moorish architecture, wide, clean streets and a long, curving driveway along a beautiful Red Sea beach. How strangely the future can turn out. If you had told me that I would be here six months ago I would have said you were insane. I am here with my brother who is all of 22 years old and studying astrophysics just outside London. He is one of the better travel companions I have ever had even though he keeps trying to get me to understand why string theory should excite me when I cannot even get beyond the fulcrum. But he makes such a good counterpoint to me on the road with his soft touch and polite manner when I can sometimes tend to be a bit barky and anxious. We are here through Thursday and I am already sorry to be leaving. More details tomorrow and possibly even some photos.

48 Hours and Counting

Ok, I have been in town for the last two days and I am hoping that I could spend a lot more time here in the future. I just returned from having an amazing dinner at a restaurant called 7 Freres. Our host recommended we have fresh fish baked in a clay oven and smeared in spices and lemon. On the side was roti bread, honey and pounded, ripe banana which we washed down with cold beer. Then we followed a huge crowd making its way to the People’s Palace (if I remember the name right) where there is an open air concert being held by a Congolese lingala band.

Djibouti is a country that feels like it is on the brink of getting wealthy. One of its great boons is the standoff between Eritrea and Ethiopia which has made the latter unwilling or able to use its traditional Eritrean port. Perhaps more importantly, the government officials with whom I have had a chance to interact seem keenly conscious of their duty to facilitate the trading desire of their people and take advantage of the country’s strategic position in the Red Sea. Then the large French and American military bases are a huge revenue earner though there is clearly a social price being paid by having thousands of heavily muscled, horny and aggressive young men with money rampaging about.

More later…

Dr. Evil Gets on the Couch

(INT. THERAPIST’S OFFICE)

We’re in the middle of a group therapy session, containing
six or seven FATHERS with their teenage SONS. It is
emotionally charged. A lot of pained expressions and coffee
in Styrofoam cups.

SON
(crying)
I love you, Dad.

DAD
I love you, Son.

(They hug. Everyone APPLAUDS. We see Dr. Evil and Scott.)

THERAPIST
That was great, Mr. Keon, Dave.
Thank you. OK, group, we have two
new member. Say hello to Scott and
his father, Mr….Ehville?

DR. EVIL
Evil, actually, Doctor Evil.

GROUP
Hello, Dr. Evil. Hello, Scott.

SCOTT EVIL
(into it)
Hello, everybody.

THERAPIST
So, Scott, why don’t we start with
you. Why are you here?

SCOTT EVIL
Well, it’s kind of weird.

THERAPIST
We don’t judge here.

SCOTT EVIL
OK. Well, I just really met my Dad
for the first time three days ago.
He was partially frozen for thirty
years. I never knew him growing up.
He comes back and now he wants me to
take over the family business.

THERAPIST
And how do you feel about that?

SCOTT EVIL
I don’t wanna take over the family
business.

DR. EVIL
But Scott, who’s going to take over
the world when I die?

SCOTT EVIL
Not me.

THERAPIST
What do you want to do, Scott?

SCOTT EVIL
I don’t know. I was thinking, maybe
I’d be a vet or something, cause I
like animals and stuff.

DR. EVIL
An evil vet?

SCOTT EVIL
No. Maybe, like, work in a petting
zoo or something.

DR. EVIL
An evil petting zoo?

SCOTT EVIL
(shouting)
You always do that!
(calm)
Anyways, this is really hard, because,
you know, my Dad is really evil.

THERAPIST
We don’t label people here, Scott.

SCOTT EVIL
No, he’s really evil.

THERAPIST
Scott.

DR. EVIL
No, the boy’s right. I really am
evil.

THERAPIST
Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re
here, that’s what’s important. A
journey of a thousand miles begins
with one step.

SCOTT EVIL
I just think, like, he hates me. I
really think he wants to kill me.

THERAPIST
OK, Scott, no one really wants to
“kill” anyone here. They say it,
but they don’t mean it.

(The group LAUGHS.)

DR. EVIL
Actually, the boy’s quite astute. I
am trying to kill him. My Evil
Associates have cautioned against
it, so here he is, unfortunately,
alive.

THERAPIST
We’ve heard from Scott, now let’s
hear from you.

DR. EVIL
The details of my life are quite
inconsequential.

THERAPIST
That’s not true, Doctor. Please,
tell us about your childhood.

GROUP
Yes, of course. Go ahead, etc.

DR. EVIL
Very well, where should I begin? My
father was a relentlessly self-
improving boulangerie owner from
Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy
and a penchant for buggery. My mother
was a fifteen-year-old French
prostitute named Chloe with webbed
feet. My father would womanize, he
would drink, he would make outrageous
claims, like he invented the question
mark. Sometimes he would accuse
chestnuts of being lazy. A sort of
general malaise that only the genius
possess and the insane lament. My
childhood was typical.

Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we’d make
meat helmets. If I was insolent, I was placed in a burlap
bag and beaten with reeds. Pretty standard, really. At the
age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the

age of fifteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically
shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shawn
scrotum. At the age of eighteen, I went off to evil medical
school. From there…

(ANGLE ON THE THERAPIST AND THE GROUP. They are stunned.)

And then I woke up in Amsterdam

Your friendly blogger has been in the Netherlands for the past couple of hours after a long sleepy flight from Addis Ababa. How surreal it is to step off a plane a few hours later and be somewhere so different from where I left. I have never gotten over the feeling that flying is magical. It is probably because of my deep ignorance of all matters relating to physics and anything with the slightest mechanical function. All I know is that I am in a metal tube full of very heavy people that somehow is making its way through the heavens. How amazing is that?

Amsterdam feels so still, so ordered. Are its differences compared to an Addis or a Nairobi merely a matter of wealth in one and not the others? Blogging at an internet cafe next to a ‘coffeeshop’ from which is wafting the smell of marijuana. It is one of the reasons I love Amsterdam: they know people smoke pot and so why not just legalise it and limit where it can be smoked? It is a policy that I think can only arise from a people who have divorced themselves from grand utopian visions and whose moral concern is focused on the individual and not the group. Having said all that, I do not think I would much enjoy living here. The place of dark-skinned folks like me seems distressingly low. Also, it might be the hour of day but the few Dutch I have encountered today seem ruder than I remember them. Let me walk a few cobblestones though before I make any conclusions.

C’mon, admit it’s funny

JERRY SPRINGER
Now Scott, tell us about your father. Share with us.

SCOTT
Well he’s the head of an evil organization that has aspirations for world
domination.

JERRY SPRINGER
And where is your father right now?

SCOTT
He’s in outer space, like frozen in a giant egg and stuffed inside a Big Boy
rocket with his cat, Mr. Bigglesworth.

JERRY SPRINGER
Really? Well, we have a surprise for you, Scott. Let’s bring out Scott’s
father, Dr Evil.

Dr Evil enters.

Lower Third Chyron: “WANTS TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD”

DR. EVIL
Hello Scott, I’m back.

SCOTT
I can’t believe you’d do this to me on national television!

DR. EVIL
They offered me a free makeover.

JERRY SPRINGER
Dr. Evil, we’ve seen a lot of the fathers here today open up to their sons,
sons to the fathers. Is there anything you’d like to share?

DR. EVIL
Share?

JERRY SPRINGER
Yes, don’t you have any secrets?

DR. EVIL
OK. I have a vestigial tail.

DR. EVIL
It’s more of a nub, really. The spine just goes on a little longer than it
should. Also, I’ve dabbled. I mean, perform fellatio once and you’re a poet,
twice and you’re a homosexual. I remember once I was being fisted by Sebastian
Cabot- but here’s where the story gets interesting. He was
lactose-intolerant. He could eat red meat all night long, but one sip of milk
and it was gastric hell. And I remember we were caught in fragrance delicto
by Henry Kissinger, and you can imagine my humiliation at having Hank hear me
say, “Mr. French, no teeth.”One of my greatest disappointments is that I never
became a song and dance man. I could have been a quadruple threat, kind of
like a despotic Ken Barry. Dancer, singer, actor, and I would possess nuclear
weapons, the latter being the most threatening of the four. I once sat on a
bus and tried to will myself a menstrual cycle. All I ended up with was a
sense of failure and a mild neuralgia in my incisor teeth and perhaps a
grudging respect for the weaker sex. I love toe cleavage. For the most part I
distrust dogs. I slept in a horse once. It was quite roomy. On second
thought, it was the Ritz. I named my left testicle ‘piss’ and my right
testicle ‘vinegar’. I wrote “It’s Raining Men”, or so the Christmas babies
told me. Oh yes, I also made a Marzipan voodoo effigy of The Fonze while I was
in coma after smoking some Peruvian prayer hash, but who at the end of the day
can honestly say they haven’t done that?

(The Springer audience is stunned, slack-jawed and for once quiet.)

Classic Scene 2

INT. STARBUCKS WORLD HEADQUARTERS

Number Two smiles weakly, breaking into a sweat on his brow.

NUMBER TWO
May I add, I appreciate you reinstating me after our little…misunderstanding.

DR. EVIL
Frau Farbissina. Wie gehts is
einen?

We see Frau. She looks a little more ‘masculine’ than before.

FRAU
Zehr gut, Herr Doctor.

DR. EVIL
How are things?

FRAU
I have come to embrace the love that dare not speak it’s name. To my right is
my lover.

We see a severe-looking German woman with one continuous eyebrow.

FRAU
Her name is Unibrau. I met her on the LPGA Tour.

DR. EVIL
Right on. Welcome, Unibrau.

Dr. Evil takes another sip of cappuccino, making the frothy milk mustache even larger.

FRAU
Doctor, you have a ‘milk mustache.’

DR. EVIL
(wiping it off, embarrassed)
Oh, I know. I know.

NUMBER TWO
Dr. Evil, I’d like to introduce
the Greek assassin, Oedipus.

(We see a swarthy Greek army guy.)
DR. EVIL
Welcome to my private army, Oedipus. Excited?

OEDIPUS
I could give a shit.

DR. EVIL
Kiss your mother with that mouth?

OEDIPUS
Yes.

DR. EVIL
Of course you do.

Dr Evil begins to press a button labelled “Oedipus” on his control panel, but Number Two interrupts.

NUMBER TWO
(clearing throat)
Dr. Evil, as you know, the rate at which you liquidate henchmen far exceeds our
ability to replace them.

DR. EVIL
I have so few pleasures left to me, Number Two. The key to life is to rotate
your vices. One day it’s executions, another day it’s creamy French cheese.
It’s like frickin’ heroin.

Concorde or my first two hours clubbing in Addis Ababa

And so now it can be said: mmk has visited the famous Concorde in Addis Ababa. And what little shreds of innocence that were still (reluctantly) hanging off me have now been stripped and buried for all eternity. Oh yes, to this son of the soil, innocence is a past state of being. Where to begin?

In the past two weeks, a number of taxi drivers have been recommending that I should visit the Concorde Hotel on account of it being lots of fun and very popular with foreigners. But since realizing that taxi drivers in Addis are made precisely from the same clay as those in Nairobi, namely that they are out to fleece anyone with the sucker look one wears in a new town, I was not willing to take them up on the offer. Besides, I have been trying to sustain a no-alcohol pledge; and thought it best to stay away since I do not associate nightclubs with sodas.

On the night in question, this past Friday to be exact, I went to have dinner at a workmate’s home. In the course of conversation, it turned out that the Concorde was just a short walking distance away. We decided to check it out and my curiosity only grew when he assured that I would see, ‘things you have never seen before bwana aiii!’

Once at Concorde and having paid the 20 birr cover charge, it took less than three minutes to realize that its popularity has nothing to do with its music or cocktails: it’s the sex for sale that draws the crowd. We were in Addis Ababa’s version of Nairobi’s Florida nightclubs.

There was an Ethiopian band playing to a crowd whose mood is best summed up as ‘hurry up and stop all that singing and dancing, we are here for other things.’ After an hour of excruciatingly unenthusiastic performances, the club music kicked in spurred on by an MC who bounced around the small space rapping along with whatever hip-hop was in any particular song. The DJ (and please oh lord I beg for leave to issue a critique that I hope does not extend throughout the city) seemed trapped in an American mid-western, early 1990s music hell. I suppose there must be a fundamental existential crisis DJs suffer when they have to play for western tourists or expats and local prostitutes. Imagine the dilemma as they build their play list for the night: do I play hip hop for the 18 year old girl who will cajole the John to buy drinks and stay longer or to her 60-year old John from a small town in Missouri? Add to that the insistent little voice in the DJs head that insists he is an artist and should be above all other concerns.

His attempt to unify the disparate audience at Concorde meant that a jazzy song was succeeded by rap, then by Lingala and then that national anthem of American middle-age angst: ‘18 till I die, 18 till I die…yeah!’

One wall of Concorde is mirrored. For the two hours I was there, several women stood in front of the mirror dancing with their own images. They were so absorbed, so taken with the obvious beauty in front of them; it must also have been a good vantage point from which to get a view of who was checking them out most ardently. The weird thing is I found myself concentrating more on the image in the mirror than on the woman standing in front of it. It was as if by looking so intently at her image, she drew me to her image and away from herself. But then since the image was also looking at her… Let us turn to our Lacan here because there is clearly a need for some further confusion. I have not read Lacan but do know at least that he wrote on the mirror stage. Imagine again this young, tightly trousered, nubile woman dancing in front of the Concorde mirror. When she was younger and had done the same thing, Lacan would have said that she was involved in the initial and necessary act of self manufacturing – by identifying the self according to the Other. And if indeed I do understand any part of other arguments he made, then perhaps the woman in the mirror was not actually her at all, but a stranger, an Other. This of course must be quite close to the truth of selling sex for money. It requires, I would suppose, a distancing, an ability to say that this is me and that woman over there in the bed under the heaving weight is some other person. A tough person who does what she has to do.

(Please do not ask that it make sense because nothing Lacan says makes sense to me. Actually nothing anyone says that involves the words self, other or identity make any sense to me anymore. I have been far too corrupted by an Anglo-Saxon veneration of words for authority’s sake. If you want to get into this a bit more, I suggest you go to Wikipedia – not that it helped me in the least)

In Greek mythology, Medusa whose gaze turned people to stone was herself turned to stone when Perseus the hero held up a mirror to her. Snow White’s Wicked Queen needed the reassurance of a magic mirror to know that she was the fairest woman in all the land. And my favorite: Harry Potter in one of the books glances into a magic mirror that reflects his deepest desire. Destruction, revelation and yearning. Surely the women in Concorde could in some way relate to the three mirrors. Or perhaps this riff of the subject is just my way of dealing with the fact that I am once again procrastinating from my long suffering thesis.

Anyway, to get back to the scene, the twenty or ladies on the floor were swaying patiently to the music. They were not actually dancing as much as showing off their wares, waiting for the prod in the back, the one that says ‘can I dance with you or buy you a drink?’

In the dim light, their eyes shifted slowly from one male face to the other. They peeled away my pretension that I was just a local accompanying some ferenjis (foreigners) out on the town. The table between me and the dance floor had white expatriates seated around it. They were behaving as if they were on dates with women whose body language to everyone except their ‘date’ reflected an utter boredom relieved only by practiced touches filled with a detached erotic promise.

At an adjoining table was a smooth looking dude in all-black clothing and exuding manicured airs. The women kept walking up to him and drifting away minutes later. He coolly appraised each as if he knew their secret which in his mind must have amounted to ‘I know what you want and it is me you want’. I suspect that he actually felt that beneath all the solicitations was a genuine desire for him since he was clearly irresistible. There are Johns whose visits to prostitutes are only made bearable by maintaining the conceit that love can flourish somewhere within the money-for-sex transaction. I found myself disliking every man in the room except for the waiters and the grossly fat, exhausted looking bouncer.

As we sat there, with me trying to hold onto my non-drinking pledge, I noticed a woman looking at me more intently than any of the others. Her eyes were filled with come hither and so I tried filling mine with ‘I am scared of you and have a wife and am considering becoming a monk.’ But her eyes ignored such pleas and insisted, ‘you know why you are here, why else would you be here if not because of me?’ By the time I came back to the table from a toilet break, her eyes had stopped talking and her mouth had taken over.

‘You want to dance?’ she asked loudly to be heard above whatever song the bastard of a DJ was playing.
‘Um, no thanks, I don’t like this song.’ I answered.
‘You want to buy me a drink?’
‘Um, not today, I am just about to leave.’
‘But I love you.’

My colleague interjected then with loud and, to my ears, very welcome laughter. ‘These ladies,’ he said into my ear, ‘they know only three words: drink, love and condom.’

Such was the adventure at the Concorde where you are promised to fly very high or very low or whatever kind of flying provided you are ready to pay the fares.

Addis Ababa Bombings

If you have ever wanted to know what you think of terrorism, try and be in a city that has just had bombs go off in a public place. This is what happened in Addis Ababa (where I am staying for now) on Friday when at least six explosions went off and killed three Ethiopians while wounding a score.

This is the third city I have been in (the others being New York and London) where civilians have been targeted by groups pursuing some kind of political agenda. I cannot stand it. It is fashionable to point to the political oppression or marginalization endured by certain groups and to conclude as understandable or even supportable those among them who choose in turn to terrorize other civilians. But being in a targeted city, not knowing whether the minibus you are riding in will explode or whether the car parked outside the cafe in which you are having coffee has a bomb in it is unbearable. I guess that is the whole point of the exercise, to make the state appear to have no control or for the state itself to wield such violence to justify its authoritarian controls. Either way, if you are a civilian it just means that you are a sitting dark, waiting for men in the shadows to make of your body and life what they will. It sounds such a discordant note to the control I have come to consider I have over my life – that there is someone somewhere who wants to make a point to someone else through my bloody remains. I think that the people in this city are very hardy. Perhaps they are made so by their history which is bloody and peopled with leaders who considered their lives expendable.

Terrorism’s great evil is in considering a stranger’s life expendable in a cause that is at most indirectly connected to that person. Whether you are bombing a ‘target’ from thousands of feet in the air knowing that you will kill a stranger or swinging a machete at them or blowing yourself up with him, the evil is in not knowing what you have brought to an end. What gross ego to consider that single life with its incalculable threads of obligation and love and hope to be irrelevant to the ideas and feelings swimming around inside you. This is why I dislike ideologues nowadays. At the logical extreme of their words lies death for strangers and privilege for themselves. I particularly dislike the ones who would mouth ideologies, especially radical ones, without having the good grace to accept that the road to their utopia is littered with broken bodies. Better those grim types who know exactly what they are willing to do to realize their plans rather than the soft self indulgence that would celebrate death at a distance while holding onto moral uprightness. I feel for those three people and their families and can only guess at the rage and despair that their deaths have caused. All for some arsehole to feel bigger and better.

Land, the eternal Gikuyu conversation

I am in Nairobi for a few days from London and just came from a ride to Athi River with my mother who is purchasing some land there. We were accompanied by my uncle, the cliche family rogue, who knows every single trick Nairobi has to part you from your money by means fair or foul. For the hour it took to drive there through heavy traffic and a seriously torn up road, we had the same conversation that we have shared since I can remember: land or to be more specific, how to acquire it and make a profit off it.

Plots were pointed out and owners identified. We had debates on the depth of the water table, the route a new trunk road will take vis-a-vis said plots of land and the provision of electricity. Prices were bandied about and expected returns in the coming years. Both my uncle and mother seem to possess a vast catalogue of information on land and its price. So there were comments like, ‘just behind those shops, an acre used to cost 10,000 shillings in 1983-85 and you can’t get one now for less than a quarter million.’ Followed by exclamations of surprise and frustration at not having spotted such obvious opportunities and pledges to never again allow such profits to slip through the fingers.

The particular land that we were driving out to contemplate is close to Daystar University. I stood admiring its look, the view and suchlike, while my uncle kept muttering that it was fat. Fat, as he explained, refers to land fertility and also suggests potential financial gains from owning it.

We had bypassed many students walking the muddy road to the Mombasa-Nairobi highway and I offered one a ride into town. As is usual when I meet a university student, I wanted to know what she was studying, quality of lectures etc. But my mother and uncle had a quite different take on what to talk about with a stranger. They asked pointed questions about student accommodation, entertainment, health provision and others in a similar vein. By the time we got back into the city, it had become clear that building self-contained hostel space, a pharmacy, a pool hall and a restaurant catering to students were promising business opportunities. The price of her accommodation was revealed in addition to her transport and entertainment costs. After we dropped her off, all mention of the beauty of the views had been replaced by strategies to ‘do some business’ on the land.

In London or New York or wherever else I have lived, I never had these types of conversations with anyone. I am sure that the British can probably relate in regard to home ownership but it struck me that this conversation was different. Perhaps I am being ignorant but I think that it was a typical Gikuyu form of dialogue. Property and its acquisition form the common ground, the public space even. And to own it is a sign of some kind of virtue. How else to explain how few conversations I have overheard since I was a child that were not anchored by some form of financial consideration.

Imagine how many millions of similar conversations are held every year and the enormous ambitions they give rise to. Gikuyu land hunger has acquired sinister overtones in different parts of the country. The image of voracious locusts springs to mind when I recall some complaints I have heard. Yet it strikes me, that kikuyus – whether wa-sapere or not – have this search at the heart of the way they regard the good life. Only property owners get a certain respect that a majority crave. The method of acquisition is less important, in fact it might be completely irrelevant since there is a sentiment I believe of the world being a tough competitive place in which victories are counted one property at a time. Imagine how many millions of similar conversations are held every year and the enormous ambitions they give rise to. Gikuyu land hunger has acquired sinister overtones in different parts of the country. The image of voracious locusts springs to mind when I recall some complaints I have heard. Yet it strikes me, that Gikuyus – whether wa-sapere or not – have this search at the heart of what they regard as the good life. Only property owners get a certain respect. The method of acquisition is less important, in fact it might be completely irrelevant since there is a sentiment I believe of the world being a tough competitive place in which victories are counted one property at a time.

My Best Friend’s Wedding

I just got back to London from Washington DC where my close friend was getting married this past weekend. Now this is a friend I have had since boarding school in Nairobi; we went to the States for university at about the same time; and roomed together in Brooklyn for some years. BK or Fort Green to be exact was one party after the other, ’shots all around’ being one of our more frequent utterances and of course where there is alcohol and testosterone, seeking the company of women was par of the course. Because of so many years spent as close friends we had developed our own private language. One of its more important concepts that we repeated like a mantra was ’standards and rules’. These were applied to women. We carefully calibrated our individual preferences, analysed them over many beers and over time codified our romantic desires and how to go about satisfying them.

It was quite juvenile really but I think very serious for all the jokes we made about it. Sometimes I think it was an attempt to create some kind of order in the chaos of being single in New York City. We formed a little community with its ethics and battlegrounds even if they were only located in lounges and the succession of parties we frequented. Our enemy, I think, was loneliness. The feeling of not being wanted in a city built on the principle of aspiration and the conceit that only those who are weak or unworthy do not realise their every dream. New York has a way of inflating or redirecting your desires. For example, you may have thought that you wanted to date a funny and down to earth person when you got off the bus from some small town or country. A few months later, you would be telling your friends that you wanted to only date funny and down to earth supermodels willing to share you with their supermodel friends.

The city makes you believe that your most fevered imaginings are just a Thursday night away, just a matter of being at the right place at the right time. That place of course being yet another darkened lounge playing the same relentlessly funky jams and filled with people who manage to simultaneously seem completely unique and uniform. Fun is what it was. So much fun that I had it coming out of my ears so that it stopped being fun – like being made to laugh continuously without being able to stop or tickled for hours on end. Our standards and rules created ever finer distinctions. Before I got to New York, I had not fully appreciated the Eddie Murphy character in Boomerang who rejects a woman because her feet have cones. With the benefit of hindsight and at a distance, I now realise that I was actually having an almost sexual relationship with the city itself. I desired it as it was reflected in all the people I used to spend time with. Proof came when I left the city for London with my mobile phone holding hundreds of numbers. A few weeks after settling in London, I scrolled through these numbers and could not recognise two-thirds of them and had no desire to speak to more than a handful. Yet these other strangers were people I had spent many hours with, shared all manner of experiences, slept with some and argued with others. But it was really never about them as much as it was about being in love with the city that forced them into the same lounge I was in or even into my bed. The city demanded fidelity and very rarely gave anything that did not sharpen your appetite for its other (waiting) charms.

When my friend and his girlfriend decided to get married, it was an act of rebellion. It could only have succeeded once they removed themselves from their relationship with New York, which they did since they now live in Washington DC. He threw off ‘standards and rules’ which allowed him I think to see that these never had the ability to help him find his bride who is so much more than what he had thought he wanted when we were in Fort Green. His asking me to be best man forced me to turn away from the language that we had honed for so long since it could scarcely help digest the course he had chosen for himself. And what has been so great about it in the last year is realising progressively that our friendship which most people who know us would think is entirely based on partying was filled with all this other good stuff which had been getting built parallel to our life of tequila shots and thong analysis.

The wedding had about 80 people and was very simple. I got to be MC and so spent most of the day stressed that I was going to drop a clanger and be forever damned. I did drop several but I think only a few people noticed them. The more I think of it and our previous friendship as single men in NYC – since we are now in a different place – the thing that makes me happiest for him is that he has looked within himself for what he wants and not allowed external standards and rules to make the decision for him. I suspect something special happened to me this past Saturday as well but time will tell, for now though I know it was one of the happier days of my life.

Baby talk is good or back to writing and reality

Continuing on with what has become a frequent – and to me quite enjoyable – exchange on the religious roots of nationalism and many forms of social cohesion, I received an email from BK below that continues where the last post on ‘Let us get back to belief shall we? Again. And memory in writing’ left off.

From: BW
To: MMK

I am thinking that the way we have learned to act is often related by what we read into the symbols that make up written language. That is, Noah is ‘real’ because he can be referenced with some consistency in many places. If I am in Muranga in 1902, Noah is realer than the Kariuki who I have heard lives in Molo and is my cousin – because the reports of him are inconsistent. If we are conversing about Noah, and disagree, I can remove my bible and show; and you remove yours. And we continue to argue – and may or may not reach a consensus – BUT, we have spent time training each other to read similar things into the Noah situation. If we do the same thing about Kariuki, immediately afterwards, we find, soon, that we cannot go far – for I believe one thing based on my interpretations of what I have heard. And you another based on your own interpretations. Our sources and emphasis may be vastly different. So for me, the heart of the growth in the importance of the bible was in its writenness.

Even when most people could not read, there were those who could and could translate or explain it to others. This power of writing, among many others, is allows people to make contracts with greater consistency. If somebody is far removed from you in the way they choose to perceive life and measure the value of physical things, it makes transactions difficult. But a text around which is a measure of consensus allows for both parties to gauge their transactions – and come up with a close result.

Belief – and faith come in because your imagination, which has much power to mimic organisms and the ‘flesh’ and interactions of living – can now solidify reality removed from present action, by constant reference to characters and situations who can be measured against your imagination, so your imagination becomes closer to the reality of the present eye.

“Noooo. You lie. Noah never lived in a fish.”

In the absence of television or radio the daily reading of the bible can make biblical characters have sustained narratives more ‘real’ than distant friends; than yourselves even, in any past. Instead of peppering examples from remembered clan transactions, it becomes more efficient to provide examples from the ‘living flesh’ of biblical relations – because they are now more real than the past.

From: MMK

Nice. That is the thing, the written word creates a canon whether it is the one that forms the basis of a nation or merely the ‘rules’ around which the interaction between cousins can be mediated as you say by an external, ‘neutral’ storehouse of experience and thought. The Bible is THE founding text in so many places, not only of nations but I think of families as well. Just a quick look at some of the stuff that Adrian Hastings and David Aberbach have to say:

Adrian Hastings: For the development of nationhood from one or more ethnicities, by far the most important and widely present factor is that of an extensively used vernacular literature. A long struggle against an external threat may also have a significant effect as, in some circumstances, does state formation, though the latter may well have no national effect whatever elsewhere. A nation may precede or follow a state of its own but it is certainly assisted by it to a greater self-consciousness. Most such developments are stimulated by the ideal of a nation-state and of the world as a society of nations originally ‘imagined’, if you like the word, through the mirror of the Bible, Europe’s primary textbook, but turned into a formal political philosophy no earlier than the nineteenth century and then next to canonised by President Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles peace settlement of 1920.

‘Religion is an integral element of many cultures, most ethnicities and some states. The Bible provided, for the Christian world at least, the original model of the nation. Without it and its Christian interpretation and implementation, it is arguable that nations and nationalism, as we know them, could never have existed. Moreover, religion has produced the dominant character of some state-shaped nations and of some nationalisms. Biblical Christianity both undergirds the cultural and political world out of which the phenomena of nationhood and nationalism as a whole developed and in a number of important cases provided a crucial ingredient for the particular history of both nations and nationalisms.’

David Aberbach: The Hebrew Bible, though generally seen mainly as a religious document, has also provided models of secular national identity. A number of biblical motifs have been revived in modern cultural nationalism: for example, the importance of moral regeneration, attacks on internal and external enemies of the nation, and the unification of disparate groups despite geographic dislocation. The Hebrew Bible also anticipates various forms of conflict in modern national identity: between the individual and the group, chosenness and egalitarianism, the narrowly national and the universal. In the two centuries after the invention of printing, the Hebrew Bible in vernacular translation had a decisive influence on the evolution of nationalism, particularly in Britain. The Bible was essential in the culture of empires but also, paradoxically, inspired defeated, suppressed and colonised people to seek freedom. A number of modern national poets, notably Whitman and the Hebrew poets Bialik and Greenberg, adopt a free verse neo-prophetic mode of _expression. The Hebrew Bible can, therefore, be read as the archetypal, and most influential, national document from ancient times to the rise of modern nationalism.

From: BW

What I am thinking is that your memory needs your imagination to create scenarios; not just new ones but to keep what you saw, heard and experienced fresh and fleshy. Left on their own, the imagination would take control of the memory and run anywhere with it. But, because you share memories with those you live with – and sharing these is central to all your dealings with everybody; they keep you close by sharing back. But this is inefficient because if you are all affected by some sudden outside event or act your memories could all be rearranged – because all memories are a present take on the past. If the present changes dramatically, the past will get rearranged too. And when people gather to renegotiate the memories, it becomes a battle of the dominant, the charming, and the witty – not of the one closer to the events as they happened. Writing made people’s relationships consistent – it offered a third party storage that could always be referred to keep the centre in the same place. So the loss was shifting centers – centers had been shifting for ages…..

So the monopoly is not Christianity to make modern nations. It comes from not Christianities ‘marketing’ of Israel; or the Judeo-Christian innovation of the 20th century nation-state. Sanskrit, King James English – same thing: a fixed centre of’ reality’ could exist for the first time; and the citizenry would now ‘radiate’ to the ‘fixed’ centre and measure themselves against it – and measure the value of things against. This made durable empire – and even more durable citizenry later. So first church is the centre of mediation; of ‘reality building’ and when it is realized that this ’system can transfer, school becomes where consistency is transmitted. Church was dangerous because power automatically transferred from the military warlord families who controlled Europe, to the pyramid of religious transfers, the priests had more power over individuals than anybody else. The only immovable thing was the black and white of the text; and power became vested in whoever could build consensus most widely around a text that claimed to represent their interests…..who could ally their power, their ideas around a text that could represent it.

So now we gather, completely gaseous against the solid reality of the text. This is what a court case is: all can shift. Fact, history, evidence, perception and future depending on how you can persuade the text. This is a parliament, an exam, a bank form, a text book, a census. A person: a corporation is simply a person composed of nothing but texts; texts talking to texts and people coming to them to mediate reality.

So. A company is realer than a person. You can track everything; and measure everything. This is a person you can do business with from anywhere in any language and you have better trust that he will deliver your maize more than you trust your brother to deliver your maize. There is no inconsistency that a company can provide than cannot be measured – it has no mystery; and mystery is what we have been trying to abandon all along. How come religious epiphanies do not call people to destroy markets or trading monopolies or access? We are all able to believe that a company will behave predictably; we are able to be completely ’secular; with it – even at the most fever-pitched time. If you kill the Tutsi shop-owner, the shop becomes colorless and a perfectly able to immediately become Hutu.

The mystery of the motivations of those Tutsis: the hidden negotiations; the suspicious genes: unchangeable, unseeable, the larger part of a person is invisible; and so the imagination of the enemy cannot be limited when drastic action is requested….there is not human way to measure the size of their threat, and so in a competition for power, the fastest disseminators of a compelling reason or strategy can win easily.

We are coming to worship the text; it has proven larger and more solid than God. You can make your text, your own one, to fit reality. But where only the bible continues as the overarching text – the war is over who owns it.

From: MMK

Is it the poppers? Is this what they do to a brain: make it spew out surprising and provocative ideas? If, as you say, memory is always new, contingent on circumstance and need, then it requires nothing as much as it does the imagination. But then I started to wonder at how differentiated are the imagination, memory, reality, the written/codified word. Take the imagination for instance which I think is sitting at the heart of your argument. Aristotle argued that the imagination is a kind of phantasm, a mind picture almost, that fused together the inputs of the sense organs. Then the modern era in the form of a Descartes followed mostly in his footsteps thinking of imagination as that which allows us to take chaotic, jumbled sense data into coherence. Hume went further: the imagination through its ability to bundle and categorize sense data leads to the use of specific words for specific impressions. Words then become a part of our empirical interaction with the world and it is this process, this joining of the mind and body that I think we call reality. Because of a shared commonality of experience in regard to sense data – for example when a Stone Age band gets chased by a woolly mammoth – there is probably a drive to standardize words. Our baby world with its constant revolutions of paradigms, perceptions and interpretations becomes a narrower, more externally agreed-upon interpretation of the physical world expressed in words.

The drive to codify develops through songs, children’s stories, etc. It gets to the point when a founding book – often a dictionary written to translate the bible into a vernacular language according to Hastings – which demands that the author choose one word and eliminate another. Language, which can vary wildly even within short distances, becomes standardized and the bible with its narratives popularizes this version of language.

Our imagination meanwhile is getting fed with an infinite amount and variation of sense-data but eventually has an ever more finite and pre-agreed store of words with which to represent a coherent picture when it can form it – it seems to me that words then curtail possibility if you think of it as an infinity of perceptual or interpretive choices. Then comes Kant who goes argues that yes, the imagination is an associative tool but that it is limited to templates that exist in the mind before the ‘entry’ of any sense data. But he has no accounting for where these formats come from; he thinks they are a mystery, a matter of the human soul – God perhaps? He too spurns the odd and perhaps impossible to communicate possibilities of perception and interpretation that we had as non-speakers of a public language but does so more reassuringly by assuring that the source of this limitation is not of this earth, not limited by the senses. I only partly go with Kant as far as the mystery of the soul, which sets me up later to conceive of a basic and essential human drive to be the need for transcendence and of our unavoidable need for a god. (But you, and correct me if I am wrong, have a strong desire to eliminate this god/heaven/beyond the grave thing from the way you conceive of human interaction with the world outside us.)

My question really is whether the imagination can ever see us beyond the sense data of the physical world. Can we as writers conceive of it as a ‘wild’ zone of creativity that is unruled or at least unruly? If so, then it offers the possibility of creating concepts or categories or a paradigm that did not exist previously. It is out of this hope of possibility that I believe the desperate refutation of death, which after all is completely confirmed by our sensory input, emerges; the need for life after death. Surely we need not tax possibility when the imagination as a picture of ‘reality’ allows us to manipulate and operate such that we are able to build systems and methods that prolong life or at least make it more profitable and comfortable. I am possibly being slightly jumbled when I say that the store you set on the memory and imagination as ways of negotiating reality does not go far enough in accounting for the element of possibility and the uses to which human beings put it. As the text becomes God, it narrows possibility. By codifying language so relentlessly we get further drawn into a conception of the world that is ever more empirically based (see the argument between creationism and evolution.) Yes, the text tends toward the solid as you say but we seem to fight this process all the way even as we use it to operate better in the world. Why else would the genocidal killer view his victim as you say, unchangeable and unseeable? Where does the act of killing lie: with the text or with an imagination unhindered by the limitations of standardized interpretations of sense perception?

Baby talk is good or back to writing and reality

Continuing on with what has become a frequent – and to me quite enjoyable – exchange on the religious roots of nationalism and many forms of social cohesion, I received an email from BK below that continues where the last post on ‘Let us get back to belief shall we? Again. And memory in writing’ left off.

From: BW
To: MMK

I am thinking that the way we have learned to act is often related by what we read into the symbols that make up written language. That is, Noah is ‘real’ because he can be referenced with some consistency in many places. If I am in Muranga in 1902, Noah is realer than the Kariuki who I have heard lives in Molo and is my cousin – because the reports of him are inconsistent. If we are conversing about Noah, and disagree, I can remove my bible and show; and you remove yours. And we continue to argue – and may or may not reach a consensus – BUT, we have spent time training each other to read similar things into the Noah situation. If we do the same thing about Kariuki, immediately afterwards, we find, soon, that we cannot go far – for I believe one thing based on my interpretations of what I have heard. And you another based on your own interpretations. Our sources and emphasis may be vastly different. So for me, the heart of the growth in the importance of the bible was in its writenness.

Even when most people could not read, there were those who could and could translate or explain it to others. This power of writing, among many others, is allows people to make contracts with greater consistency. If somebody is far removed from you in the way they choose to perceive life and measure the value of physical things, it makes transactions difficult. But a text around which is a measure of consensus allows for both parties to gauge their transactions – and come up with a close result.

Belief – and faith come in because your imagination, which has much power to mimic organisms and the ‘flesh’ and interactions of living – can now solidify reality removed from present action, by constant reference to characters and situations who can be measured against your imagination, so your imagination becomes closer to the reality of the present eye.

“Noooo. You lie. Noah never lived in a fish.”

In the absence of television or radio the daily reading of the bible can make biblical characters have sustained narratives more ‘real’ than distant friends; than yourselves even, in any past. Instead of peppering examples from remembered clan transactions, it becomes more efficient to provide examples from the ‘living flesh’ of biblical relations – because they are now more real than the past.

From: MMK

Nice. That is the thing, the written word creates a canon whether it is the one that forms the basis of a nation or merely the ‘rules’ around which the interaction between cousins can be mediated as you say by an external, ‘neutral’ storehouse of experience and thought. The Bible is THE founding text in so many places, not only of nations but I think of families as well. Just a quick look at some of the stuff that Adrian Hastings and David Aberbach have to say:

Adrian Hastings: For the development of nationhood from one or more ethnicities, by far the most important and widely present factor is that of an extensively used vernacular literature. A long struggle against an external threat may also have a significant effect as, in some circumstances, does state formation, though the latter may well have no national effect whatever elsewhere. A nation may precede or follow a state of its own but it is certainly assisted by it to a greater self-consciousness. Most such developments are stimulated by the ideal of a nation-state and of the world as a society of nations originally ‘imagined’, if you like the word, through the mirror of the Bible, Europe’s primary textbook, but turned into a formal political philosophy no earlier than the nineteenth century and then next to canonised by President Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles peace settlement of 1920.

‘Religion is an integral element of many cultures, most ethnicities and some states. The Bible provided, for the Christian world at least, the original model of the nation. Without it and its Christian interpretation and implementation, it is arguable that nations and nationalism, as we know them, could never have existed. Moreover, religion has produced the dominant character of some state-shaped nations and of some nationalisms. Biblical Christianity both undergirds the cultural and political world out of which the phenomena of nationhood and nationalism as a whole developed and in a number of important cases provided a crucial ingredient for the particular history of both nations and nationalisms.’

David Aberbach: The Hebrew Bible, though generally seen mainly as a religious document, has also provided models of secular national identity. A number of biblical motifs have been revived in modern cultural nationalism: for example, the importance of moral regeneration, attacks on internal and external enemies of the nation, and the unification of disparate groups despite geographic dislocation. The Hebrew Bible also anticipates various forms of conflict in modern national identity: between the individual and the group, chosenness and egalitarianism, the narrowly national and the universal. In the two centuries after the invention of printing, the Hebrew Bible in vernacular translation had a decisive influence on the evolution of nationalism, particularly in Britain. The Bible was essential in the culture of empires but also, paradoxically, inspired defeated, suppressed and colonised people to seek freedom. A number of modern national poets, notably Whitman and the Hebrew poets Bialik and Greenberg, adopt a free verse neo-prophetic mode of _expression. The Hebrew Bible can, therefore, be read as the archetypal, and most influential, national document from ancient times to the rise of modern nationalism.

From: BW

What I am thinking is that your memory needs your imagination to create scenarios; not just new ones but to keep what you saw, heard and experienced fresh and fleshy. Left on their own, the imagination would take control of the memory and run anywhere with it. But, because you share memories with those you live with – and sharing these is central to all your dealings with everybody; they keep you close by sharing back. But this is inefficient because if you are all affected by some sudden outside event or act your memories could all be rearranged – because all memories are a present take on the past. If the present changes dramatically, the past will get rearranged too. And when people gather to renegotiate the memories, it becomes a battle of the dominant, the charming, and the witty – not of the one closer to the events as they happened. Writing made people’s relationships consistent – it offered a third party storage that could always be referred to keep the centre in the same place. So the loss was shifting centers – centers had been shifting for ages…..

So the monopoly is not Christianity to make modern nations. It comes from not Christianities ‘marketing’ of Israel; or the Judeo-Christian innovation of the 20th century nation-state. Sanskrit, King James English – same thing: a fixed centre of’ reality’ could exist for the first time; and the citizenry would now ‘radiate’ to the ‘fixed’ centre and measure themselves against it – and measure the value of things against. This made durable empire – and even more durable citizenry later. So first church is the centre of mediation; of ‘reality building’ and when it is realized that this ’system can transfer, school becomes where consistency is transmitted. Church was dangerous because power automatically transferred from the military warlord families who controlled Europe, to the pyramid of religious transfers, the priests had more power over individuals than anybody else. The only immovable thing was the black and white of the text; and power became vested in whoever could build consensus most widely around a text that claimed to represent their interests…..who could ally their power, their ideas around a text that could represent it.

So now we gather, completely gaseous against the solid reality of the text. This is what a court case is: all can shift. Fact, history, evidence, perception and future depending on how you can persuade the text. This is a parliament, an exam, a bank form, a text book, a census. A person: a corporation is simply a person composed of nothing but texts; texts talking to texts and people coming to them to mediate reality.

So. A company is realer than a person. You can track everything; and measure everything. This is a person you can do business with from anywhere in any language and you have better trust that he will deliver your maize more than you trust your brother to deliver your maize. There is no inconsistency that a company can provide than cannot be measured – it has no mystery; and mystery is what we have been trying to abandon all along. How come religious epiphanies do not call people to destroy markets or trading monopolies or access? We are all able to believe that a company will behave predictably; we are able to be completely ’secular; with it – even at the most fever-pitched time. If you kill the Tutsi shop-owner, the shop becomes colorless and a perfectly able to immediately become Hutu.

The mystery of the motivations of those Tutsis: the hidden negotiations; the suspicious genes: unchangeable, unseeable, the larger part of a person is invisible; and so the imagination of the enemy cannot be limited when drastic action is requested….there is not human way to measure the size of their threat, and so in a competition for power, the fastest disseminators of a compelling reason or strategy can win easily.

We are coming to worship the text; it has proven larger and more solid than God. You can make your text, your own one, to fit reality. But where only the bible continues as the overarching text – the war is over who owns it.

From: MMK

Is it the poppers? Is this what they do to a brain: make it spew out surprising and provocative ideas? If, as you say, memory is always new, contingent on circumstance and need, then it requires nothing as much as it does the imagination. But then I started to wonder at how differentiated are the imagination, memory, reality, the written/codified word. Take the imagination for instance which I think is sitting at the heart of your argument. Aristotle argued that the imagination is a kind of phantasm, a mind picture almost, that fused together the inputs of the sense organs. Then the modern era in the form of a Descartes followed mostly in his footsteps thinking of imagination as that which allows us to take chaotic, jumbled sense data into coherence. Hume went further: the imagination through its ability to bundle and categorize sense data leads to the use of specific words for specific impressions. Words then become a part of our empirical interaction with the world and it is this process, this joining of the mind and body that I think we call reality. Because of a shared commonality of experience in regard to sense data – for example when a Stone Age band gets chased by a woolly mammoth – there is probably a drive to standardize words. Our baby world with its constant revolutions of paradigms, perceptions and interpretations becomes a narrower, more externally agreed-upon interpretation of the physical world expressed in words.

The drive to codify develops through songs, children’s stories, etc. It gets to the point when a founding book – often a dictionary written to translate the bible into a vernacular language according to Hastings – which demands that the author choose one word and eliminate another. Language, which can vary wildly even within short distances, becomes standardized and the bible with its narratives popularizes this version of language.

Our imagination meanwhile is getting fed with an infinite amount and variation of sense-data but eventually has an ever more finite and pre-agreed store of words with which to represent a coherent picture when it can form it – it seems to me that words then curtail possibility if you think of it as an infinity of perceptual or interpretive choices. Then comes Kant who goes argues that yes, the imagination is an associative tool but that it is limited to templates that exist in the mind before the ‘entry’ of any sense data. But he has no accounting for where these formats come from; he thinks they are a mystery, a matter of the human soul – God perhaps? He too spurns the odd and perhaps impossible to communicate possibilities of perception and interpretation that we had as non-speakers of a public language but does so more reassuringly by assuring that the source of this limitation is not of this earth, not limited by the senses. I only partly go with Kant as far as the mystery of the soul, which sets me up later to conceive of a basic and essential human drive to be the need for transcendence and of our unavoidable need for a god. (But you, and correct me if I am wrong, have a strong desire to eliminate this god/heaven/beyond the grave thing from the way you conceive of human interaction with the world outside us.)

My question really is whether the imagination can ever see us beyond the sense data of the physical world. Can we as writers conceive of it as a ‘wild’ zone of creativity that is unruled or at least unruly? If so, then it offers the possibility of creating concepts or categories or a paradigm that did not exist previously. It is out of this hope of possibility that I believe the desperate refutation of death, which after all is completely confirmed by our sensory input, emerges; the need for life after death. Surely we need not tax possibility when the imagination as a picture of ‘reality’ allows us to manipulate and operate such that we are able to build systems and methods that prolong life or at least make it more profitable and comfortable. I am possibly being slightly jumbled when I say that the store you set on the memory and imagination as ways of negotiating reality does not go far enough in accounting for the element of possibility and the uses to which human beings put it. As the text becomes God, it narrows possibility. By codifying language so relentlessly we get further drawn into a conception of the world that is ever more empirically based (see the argument between creationism and evolution.) Yes, the text tends toward the solid as you say but we seem to fight this process all the way even as we use it to operate better in the world. Why else would the genocidal killer view his victim as you say, unchangeable and unseeable? Where does the act of killing lie: with the text or with an imagination unhindered by the limitations of standardized interpretations of sense perception?

1st Annual Kaybees – the Kenyan Blog Awards

Nominations are now closed and this blog has been nominated in the best political blog category for which of course I am quite excited and thankful. Unfortunately, while anyone could nominate a weblog, only Kenya Blogs Webring members can vote on the final outcome which strikes me as strange since it excludes readers who are such an intimate part of blogging.

Fasting Diary: The Path (Back) to the Warrior

I have been fasting for the past six hours and cannot think from the hunger. I am delirious with it and cannot imagine that I will be able to maintain it for a week. My stomach after hearing that Head Division had ruled the start of a fast went into full scale battle mode. It immediately initiated a civil disobedience campaign of sharp unexpected intestinal twistings and loud, rumbling cries of ‘no food, no justice’. The sight of a portly man eating a brie and ham sandwich as I walked by him in search of Miso soup made me hurriedly close my moaning mouth just before a gob of saliva escaped. By tomorrow, the odds are that I will be lying on my couch with harly the strength to use the remote control. But with the ever valiant and dictatorial (to the rest of the body) Head Division on duty, I am sure there shall be orders to the fingers to provide periodic updates to you decadent types with your sandwiches and breads and pies, beers, ice creams, steaks…damn you all!

I used to fast occasionally to try and give my ever-working tummy a rest. Does it not sometimes rankle how cow-like eating is, the endless munching and swallowing, the helplessness of needing to eat or die, the boring predictability? Since I have been in London, the training regime I used to have in New York fell apart. I could not find a dojo that I enjoyed and for the life of me cannot get myself to run consistently in the grey weather. My willpower – or the little there is of it – used to be expressed mainly through goals I set myself in Vee Arnis Jitsu. Not anymore. Now it occasionally pokes its little head from its hiding place to will the writing of bits of my thesis and the occasional short story. The bastard can last for weeks without raising the slightest murmur of protest at my procrastinations. Enough I said to my brother last night, enough of this self-indulgence that has turned my body into the soft, spoilt, library-visiting, tiring, weak lump that I used to hold in contempt (and fear). Back to the lean warrior ready to run all night to besiege and lay to waste a city by day. My brother of course laughed heartily and cruelly; he does not think I will last more than a day.

The goal for the week is to limit myself to light liquids. It is to be Miso soup and its brothy equivalents, water, teas and possibly, very possibly given I have business meetings to attend in the evenings, vodka. (Just got some anonymous advice on eating occassional bits of fiber-filled veggies that I will follow.)

Stay glued to this spot for updates as I attempt a return to the path of right, to reclaiming my body from the forces of laziness and weakness. Back to the world of willed pain to build strength and endurance. Back to the jujitsu throw and to the skinned knuckles of Arnis stick training.

In these days of fear-mongering as argument, I expect that some reader will think to chime in with advice about how unsafe this plan may be. Or even how ‘insensitive’ I am being at a time when there are people actually starving to death. But I will only be listening to those who actually advise me how to get through it as planned. Wish me luck.

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Let us get back to belief shall we? Again. And memory in writing.

From: MMK
To: BW, BK

Hey, take a look at the excerpt below drawn from an essay by Eugene McCarraher called The Incoherence of Hannah Arendt: Breaking the marriage between heaven and earth

‘Arendt’s intellectual debut was a dissertation on Augustine’s conception of love. It’s a convoluted and repetitious monograph, bathed in the brooding earnestness of Existenz philosophy. Arendt delineates the crucial Augustinian distinction between cupiditas: the love of worldly goods for their ministration to one’s immediate desires; and caritas: the love of eternal goods and especially of God, a love which then enables us to love earthly things rightly. For those possessed by cupiditas, earthly life is a tragedy of accumulation, for the things and people they acquire or control cannot satisfy the desire for eternal happiness that animates their errant love. Even worse for the prisoners of cupiditas, life’s intractable brevity implies no horizon beyond the grave, and so the avoidance of death, “transformed into the worst evil,” compels the most desperate and even horrific conduct. While she must have remembered the sting of cupiditas in her futile love for Heidegger, Arendt seems to have recognized the outlines of caritas in their philosophical communion. Arendt also saw that memory was central to Augustine’s moral reflection, for in revisiting what he dubbed “the camps and vast palaces of memory,” we also glimpse the kingdom that lies beyond the injustice and suffering of the earthly city. If God is the Alpha and the Omega, the genesis and the telos, then “the return to one’s origin,” as she glossed Augustine, “can be an anticipatory reference to one’s end.” Those who fully recognize and accept their beginning in time will practice “remembrance and gratitude,” an unstinting thankfulness for the unmerited gift of existence from which all genuine virtue arises. And finally, eschatology, Arendt realized, is a remembrance of things future, a capacity, as Eliot put it, to see the place for the first time. Indeed, “it is memory and not expectation . . . that gives unity and wholeness to human existence.” Contrary to Marx, for whom the past was a burden on the brains of the living, Arendt maintained that memory, the personal and collective storehouse of injustice, heroism, barbarity, and magnificence is an ark of liberation, a reminder that the present does not define the limits of human possibility.

From: BW

An excellent essay – but I think I was not persuaded by its central thesis that Arendt is incoherent because she refuses to see religious good and bad within the prism of faith; or even take into account its presence from a distance.

The guy fails to mention that the very possibility of seeing from without means that there are people who have lived within certain religious faiths for so long that the ideas are ingrained in a culture that may one day feel it has “gone past all that” – but that’s neither here nor there.

The idea of a ‘future memory’ excites me: of course what picture can you project onto a screen that tells you where you are going? And that you need to use the past to make this up. And the thing to deal with – and here I am reaching – maybe it is not death we fear so much, but the present which, without the past or a projected fear is a black hole. Death is at least clear about itself. What about the fear of the open-ended?

MMK wrote:

We are back to the matter of whether it is our fear of death that leads to the desire for assured immortality or the transcendent idea. Back to Spengler (Asia Time’s Spengler) who reviews Rosenzweig (in a book I intend to purchase). Rosenzweig says it so much better than me:

From death – from the fear of death – arises the perception of the transcendent, his book begins, and in the face of the fear of death, one proceeds – to life, as he avers in the book’s last sentence. But the path to life requires a life outside of time, that is, the hope of immortality. Man cannot abide his mortal existence, cannot tolerate the fear of death, without the prospect of life eternal.

Sure we can fear the open ended but death’s very clarity and inevitability, one that appears to mock all our material efforts on earth as futile, is what makes it unbearable. This future memory as you put it is not about a life lived merely on this earth but life eternal. Memory as a storehouse that is used in this case to fashion the case for future immortality, not a few more years on earth with a little more money and food. What we pursue is assurance that death is merely a gate to further life. Why exactly am I making this point? search me. But I think that I am trying to fashion some kind of understanding of what so many people in Kenya and elsewhere are looking for when they turn to the heavens. I think that Marx’s point which is where I have been for years does not really explain this hunger for the spirit. He says that ‘religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering…’ That ‘religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’ From this, I used to surmise like he did that religion is a lifeboat of hope in a cruel world clung to by people who do not understand the REAL causes of their worldly suffering. Of course this is true, but the true anguish for most people is the idea of death. Beyond a certain wretched condition, the most unbearable of cruelties is of death. OK, I am repeating myself. But just to finish, I think from this conception of what a ‘life’ is springs the need for a history which gives you the material to catapult you past the grave; this is, I think, the foundation of most narratives employed by people.

From BK:

Everyday-religion and my reactions to it – i.e. disgust with evangelical B.S, the pretentiousness of the P.C.E.A of my childhood – blind me to the great ideas of theology i.e. cupiditas, caritas, and the theology of Augustine. I find myself dismissing anything with a whiff of religion in it, becoming emotional and mistakenly thinking it is the lens being used to pose great ideas. This is probably crazy considering that theology has held and continues to hold some of the most far-reaching, intensive conversations about Being. Unfortunately, like politics, which draws the same reaction from me as political theory, everyday religion makes a mockery of the beautiful ideas of theology. It tends toward the mundane, everyday and the ugly. The eternal good is sacrificed in the bleating of a Margaret Wanjiru. Religion destroys the imagination rather than celebrates it, fundamentalism in the name of religion always makes the masses more mediocre.

Really, religion in Kenya today talks the talk of eternal good, but there is huge craving for the here and now. And the result is multitudes of people who are caught up in-the-between. They fail to find either earthly pleasures or the eternal good. And for what, because they live in cycles of striving for the latter but dying for the former. I guess you might as well be a hedonist, accept it and get over and done with as opposed to being a hedonistic failure one and living in cycles of constant regrets of the flesh, seeking absolution, and going around in a never ending circle, which is no way to live. These people translate into the pastor who goes to Koinange Street , Moi and the church going thing, the goat eating Kenyan Saturday and the fundamentalist Kenyan Sunday morning …Man! Schizophrenia. Interesting thing is that all these mundane things are what give the writer fodder. What happens when you apply a religious fervor in your pursuit of money? You get the Kikuyu Calvinist. What about religious fervor and sex …

Anyway, the thing of history as a glimpse of the transcendental is amazing. Kundera immediately comes to mind, especially his ideas that writing like laughter and forgetting become the 3 things that save us from the great tragedy of life. Of course, Arendt takes it further and saying that the real secret lies in the past. My own thoughts on writing and memory are based on a quote I really like (but have forgotten who said it): The great tragedy of life is nothing else but the boredom, the constant waiting in line. For me this is true in a sense, but obviously only if you live in the here and now rather than skipping merrily between past and future. And what is writing really about but trying to make sense of a past and present to talk about the future. Writing is the place that tries to capture life through a glimpse of the transcendental, be it in the past, present and future. I wonder what happens when you look at these ideas and use them to analyze contemporary Kenyan stories. Arendt’s ideas would be interesting if used to look at say: Discovering Home which is about is really about memories of home.

Let us get back to belief shall we? Again. And memory in writing.

From: MMK
To: BW, BK

Hey, take a look at the excerpt below drawn from an essay by Eugene McCarraher called The Incoherence of Hannah Arendt: Breaking the marriage between heaven and earth

‘Arendt’s intellectual debut was a dissertation on Augustine’s conception of love. It’s a convoluted and repetitious monograph, bathed in the brooding earnestness of Existenz philosophy. Arendt delineates the crucial Augustinian distinction between cupiditas: the love of worldly goods for their ministration to one’s immediate desires; and caritas: the love of eternal goods and especially of God, a love which then enables us to love earthly things rightly. For those possessed by cupiditas, earthly life is a tragedy of accumulation, for the things and people they acquire or control cannot satisfy the desire for eternal happiness that animates their errant love. Even worse for the prisoners of cupiditas, life’s intractable brevity implies no horizon beyond the grave, and so the avoidance of death, “transformed into the worst evil,” compels the most desperate and even horrific conduct. While she must have remembered the sting of cupiditas in her futile love for Heidegger, Arendt seems to have recognized the outlines of caritas in their philosophical communion. Arendt also saw that memory was central to Augustine’s moral reflection, for in revisiting what he dubbed “the camps and vast palaces of memory,” we also glimpse the kingdom that lies beyond the injustice and suffering of the earthly city. If God is the Alpha and the Omega, the genesis and the telos, then “the return to one’s origin,” as she glossed Augustine, “can be an anticipatory reference to one’s end.” Those who fully recognize and accept their beginning in time will practice “remembrance and gratitude,” an unstinting thankfulness for the unmerited gift of existence from which all genuine virtue arises. And finally, eschatology, Arendt realized, is a remembrance of things future, a capacity, as Eliot put it, to see the place for the first time. Indeed, “it is memory and not expectation . . . that gives unity and wholeness to human existence.” Contrary to Marx, for whom the past was a burden on the brains of the living, Arendt maintained that memory, the personal and collective storehouse of injustice, heroism, barbarity, and magnificence is an ark of liberation, a reminder that the present does not define the limits of human possibility.

From: BW

An excellent essay – but I think I was not persuaded by its central thesis that Arendt is incoherent because she refuses to see religious good and bad within the prism of faith; or even take into account its presence from a distance.

The guy fails to mention that the very possibility of seeing from without means that there are people who have lived within certain religious faiths for so long that the ideas are ingrained in a culture that may one day feel it has “gone past all that” – but that’s neither here nor there.

The idea of a ‘future memory’ excites me: of course what picture can you project onto a screen that tells you where you are going? And that you need to use the past to make this up. And the thing to deal with – and here I am reaching – maybe it is not death we fear so much, but the present which, without the past or a projected fear is a black hole. Death is at least clear about itself. What about the fear of the open-ended?

MMK wrote:

We are back to the matter of whether it is our fear of death that leads to the desire for assured immortality or the transcendent idea. Back to Spengler (Asia Time’s Spengler) who reviews Rosenzweig (in a book I intend to purchase). Rosenzweig says it so much better than me:

From death – from the fear of death – arises the perception of the transcendent, his book begins, and in the face of the fear of death, one proceeds – to life, as he avers in the book’s last sentence. But the path to life requires a life outside of time, that is, the hope of immortality. Man cannot abide his mortal existence, cannot tolerate the fear of death, without the prospect of life eternal.

Sure we can fear the open ended but death’s very clarity and inevitability, one that appears to mock all our material efforts on earth as futile, is what makes it unbearable. This future memory as you put it is not about a life lived merely on this earth but life eternal. Memory as a storehouse that is used in this case to fashion the case for future immortality, not a few more years on earth with a little more money and food. What we pursue is assurance that death is merely a gate to further life. Why exactly am I making this point? search me. But I think that I am trying to fashion some kind of understanding of what so many people in Kenya and elsewhere are looking for when they turn to the heavens. I think that Marx’s point which is where I have been for years does not really explain this hunger for the spirit. He says that ‘religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering…’ That ‘religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’ From this, I used to surmise like he did that religion is a lifeboat of hope in a cruel world clung to by people who do not understand the REAL causes of their worldly suffering. Of course this is true, but the true anguish for most people is the idea of death. Beyond a certain wretched condition, the most unbearable of cruelties is of death. OK, I am repeating myself. But just to finish, I think from this conception of what a ‘life’ is springs the need for a history which gives you the material to catapult you past the grave; this is, I think, the foundation of most narratives employed by people.

From BK:

Everyday-religion and my reactions to it – i.e. disgust with evangelical B.S, the pretentiousness of the P.C.E.A of my childhood – blind me to the great ideas of theology i.e. cupiditas, caritas, and the theology of Augustine. I find myself dismissing anything with a whiff of religion in it, becoming emotional and mistakenly thinking it is the lens being used to pose great ideas. This is probably crazy considering that theology has held and continues to hold some of the most far-reaching, intensive conversations about Being. Unfortunately, like politics, which draws the same reaction from me as political theory, everyday religion makes a mockery of the beautiful ideas of theology. It tends toward the mundane, everyday and the ugly. The eternal good is sacrificed in the bleating of a Margaret Wanjiru. Religion destroys the imagination rather than celebrates it, fundamentalism in the name of religion always makes the masses more mediocre.

Really, religion in Kenya today talks the talk of eternal good, but there is huge craving for the here and now. And the result is multitudes of people who are caught up in-the-between. They fail to find either earthly pleasures or the eternal good. And for what, because they live in cycles of striving for the latter but dying for the former. I guess you might as well be a hedonist, accept it and get over and done with as opposed to being a hedonistic failure one and living in cycles of constant regrets of the flesh, seeking absolution, and going around in a never ending circle, which is no way to live. These people translate into the pastor who goes to Koinange Street , Moi and the church going thing, the goat eating Kenyan Saturday and the fundamentalist Kenyan Sunday morning …Man! Schizophrenia. Interesting thing is that all these mundane things are what give the writer fodder. What happens when you apply a religious fervor in your pursuit of money? You get the Kikuyu Calvinist. What about religious fervor and sex …

Anyway, the thing of history as a glimpse of the transcendental is amazing. Kundera immediately comes to mind, especially his ideas that writing like laughter and forgetting become the 3 things that save us from the great tragedy of life. Of course, Arendt takes it further and saying that the real secret lies in the past. My own thoughts on writing and memory are based on a quote I really like (but have forgotten who said it): The great tragedy of life is nothing else but the boredom, the constant waiting in line. For me this is true in a sense, but obviously only if you live in the here and now rather than skipping merrily between past and future. And what is writing really about but trying to make sense of a past and present to talk about the future. Writing is the place that tries to capture life through a glimpse of the transcendental, be it in the past, present and future. I wonder what happens when you look at these ideas and use them to analyze contemporary Kenyan stories. Arendt’s ideas would be interesting if used to look at say: Discovering Home which is about is really about memories of home.

Friendly Advice to the African Headed to Liberal Arts College America

Congratulations on your acceptance letter my friend. You must now tap into the deep rivers of American survival craft that I, with the help of the wise ones, have fashioned for the better part of a dozen years. You have struggled mightily to gain that visa, found just the right angle to pitch your proposal for a grant (’I was a child soldier before I went for a sex-change operation and I shed tears for the environment every night’) and you are very clever and have read many books. But, and indulge me in saying this, you are a babe in nappies when it comes to the Herculean challenges facing the African man in his first year at an American liberal arts campus. The bigger your scholarship, the more prestigious the school, the more you need me. For a one-time fee of beers, which I will collect when I next see you, I will let you in on a few of my many secrets of how to keep the winter darkness at bay and your sanity intact. Here are some basics that you may want to keep in mind:

1. Black Man Rage: This is unavoidable on the whole and should be managed carefully. Every once in a while, you will feel a massive surge of anger at a very reasonable stance or action by a white person. Breathe deeply when you feel it coming on and let rip when it first appears. Allowing it to build will only guarantee its nuclear-like proportions when it eventually explodes; better to let it go at grenade stage. BMR, which is a clinically proven state, is brought on by mercy, understanding and a certain slow nodding motion that has been perfected by the white denizens of liberal arts colleges. I could tell you more grasshopper, but you will learn as you feel. There is only one situation in which you must avoid BMR: when you are inevitably stopped by the cops. You will have generously suppressed it earlier only to see it emerge in the presence of an armed man with little compunction shooting terrorists and angry black men.

2. The Drought: You must forget sex for three-six months after your arrival on campus. You will discover that your language of sex (unless it is monetary) sounds like Martian to the co-eds around you. Being a writer and having dreads might allow you to cut some of the Drought period but make no mistake, there shall be a drought. What this will do is increase BMR and can potentially be demoralizing. There is nothing quite like disrespecting people who then refuse to be seduced by you. It crushes even the strongest egos. Even those that the owner did not know they possessed. The Drought will lead you down several wrong paths. It will make you believe for instance that the slow-nodding liberal girl from a small town in California is about to give you action. Nothing could be further from the truth, she is likely of the opinion that you are a diseased pet placed on campus for her entertainment (and here I stop to collect my breath and swallow a sudden, bitter spike of BMR).

3. Collegiality: this is a biggie. The fact that you are going to a college town means that the faculty sets great store by this word, and that they are supposedly proud and committed to teaching. Nothing could be further from the truth. Small towns breed intense jealousies and rivalries that use weapons of exceeding pettiness to win the day. The spoils? You would hardly recognize them but everyone around you will be attuned to nuances that you can barely guess at. My dear, you are a collegial fellow and so this itself might be your saving grace since you will appear to fall straight into line. And a line is what it is. My advice for what it is worth is that you must do occasional writerly huffs and adopt a few eccentricities. Walking barefoot on a snowy day for example will go a long way to excusing your every absence from collegial gatherings.

4. The Smile: the slight movement of the lips that you will confuse with a smile and that will eventually make you wish that you could punch through it. The Smile is a very great danger to the African who is suffering from the Drought and is therefore partial to BMR. You, being collegial, will no doubt initially respond to this movement of the lips with a Sambo type smile that shows a delight that you can hardly explain at the sight of this almost-stranger. When you finally realize that they are not smiling and that it is at best merely a courtesy and at worst a sign of nervousness or fear at your screaming blackness, you will be liable to losing it and going down a particularly bad path. I heard one African scream for a whole afternoon at anyone who moved their lips in said fashion to him.

Let me leave you with just those four items. There will be others should you need or want them. Remember, there is no spoon, it is you that must bend… Peace African, have a good trip. I’ll see you when I come to bail you out.

The Wisdom of Homer

Homer: Are you saying you’re never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal.
Homer: Heh heh heh. Ooh, yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

Marge: Homer, the plant called. They said if you don’t show up tomorrow don’t bother showing up on Monday.
Homer: Woo-hoo. Four-day weekend.

Homer: How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?

Homer: Aw, twenty dollars! I wanted a peanut!
Homer’s Brain: Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts!
Homer: Explain how!
Homer’s Brain: Money can be exchanged for goods and services!
Homer: Woo-hoo!

‘How to write about Africa’ by Binyavanga Wainaina

some tips: sunsets and starvation are good
Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Find the rest of this hilarious and cutting essay here.

AB&H Dictionary: Is History a god?

Late last week, I visited the Public Records Office in Kew Gardens here in the UK for some archival research. The building – which is pictured above – feels and looks so much like a church that I suspect many visitors feel impelled to speak in hushed tones once they drive into the compound. After a few hours of browsing the records, I was struck by how common phrases regarding history’s opinions were: History will judge; it will absolve; condemn; favor; and even love…

This topic came up at my dinner with English acquaintances who regularly rub shoulders with their countrymen in high office. One of them revealed that the frequently issued media warnings of ‘History condemning’ one politician or the other are actually felt as a weighty moral judgment on a personal level. I tried to imagine a Kenyan politician suffering sleepless nights worrying about History’s judgment (maybe for ordering commando raids on a newspaper) and found it impossible to believe that it would even count as a mild concern. So let me suggest this: History in these Isles is a kind of god who influences behavior and condemns or praises with the Historian as priest or prophet. By contrast, for us in Kenya, and much of Africa, academic (written and stored) history is mostly an act of ideological recovery that attempts to break away from the European orbit (‘We are human too’ it says; ‘we also had kings and queens’; ‘look, here are the records of how badly you treated me’). It seems to me to be purely reactive, especially since most of our historians’ obsession with the history that they are trying to erect is merely a rebellion against the history as deity that they encountered in the Makereres and the Cambridges.

The PRO contains public records that span an unbroken period from the 11th century to the present. It is this mountain of paper, which of course represents an exceedingly small proportion of the human actions that occurred during those 1000 years that looms over today’s official actions. Its foundational assumption is of a linear progression, in which every (super)man has a role to play ushering a trans-generational narrative onward, higher, toward the end of the world (a heaven or a hell.) As has increasingly become the case, everywhere I look and much of what I hear in this most secular of societies is deeply religious; this being the case as well in socialist systems that retained the very same sense of an unerring march toward an end-point. How else could one justify such teleology when a truly secular system of intellectual inquiry would I think more accurately regard history as characterized by discontinuity, rupture and lacking in an inherent direction?

What of those who have ‘no history’ in the sense that their archives only carry records spanning a couple of hundred years, if that, and even the efforts of the oral traditions investigator yield little knowledge of life a few centuries ago? How fitting it should be that it is in the very societies lacking the massive backlog of records that religious feeling is at its most intense. Perhaps all those prayer sessions in Jeevanjee Gardens and in the thousands of Kenyan churches are about building a history and even a nation. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…’ says the book of Genesis rushing onward to the creation of the world, of man and eventually of the nation of Israel which has been the idealized model for Christendom’s nations.

Whether indeed we Gentiles can graft ourselves into this history is supported by the epistle of Paul and Galatians which promise that Kenyan Christians can in fact become a ‘new Israel’. Perhaps this is why when I visit my grandma’s digs in Nyeri I encounter frequent signage on churches and roadside posters proclaiming a New Israel to be at hand. These in the context of history as a narrative with its spiritual beginnings and endings (parallel – and so perhaps inspired by – the birth and death of the individual) imply that the popular history of Kenya mostly exists in the charismatic and not bureaucratic-rational realm. Why I am saying all this? To merely suggest that the drive and the need for history in Kenya has found biblical soil to be more fertile than the archive and furthermore that this is what history has always been about anyway.

(I may also have written this post because I wish this to be so, so that I can stay out of the archives:-))

BTW: If you are not a Eastern European mercenary leading commando raids on the Standard Newspaper, and therefore frown on such antics, please send an email to State House Kenya (president@statehousekenya.go.ke) expressing your opposition to the events of recent days. Also, take a look at a great post in Thinker’s Room on the subject.

AB&H Dictionary: Is History a god?

Late last week, I visited the Public Records Office in Kew Gardens here in the UK for some archival research. The building – which is pictured above – feels and looks so much like a church that I suspect many visitors feel impelled to speak in hushed tones once they drive into the compound. After a few hours of browsing the records, I was struck by how common phrases regarding history’s opinions were: History will judge; it will absolve; condemn; favor; and even love…

This topic came up at my dinner with English acquaintances who regularly rub shoulders with their countrymen in high office. One of them revealed that the frequently issued media warnings of ‘History condemning’ one politician or the other are actually felt as a weighty moral judgment on a personal level. I tried to imagine a Kenyan politician suffering sleepless nights worrying about History’s judgment (maybe for ordering commando raids on a newspaper) and found it impossible to believe that it would even count as a mild concern. So let me suggest this: History in these Isles is a kind of god who influences behavior and condemns or praises with the Historian as priest or prophet. By contrast, for us in Kenya, and much of Africa, academic (written and stored) history is mostly an act of ideological recovery that attempts to break away from the European orbit (‘We are human too’ it says; ‘we also had kings and queens’; ‘look, here are the records of how badly you treated me’). It seems to me to be purely reactive, especially since most of our historians’ obsession with the history that they are trying to erect is merely a rebellion against the history as deity that they encountered in the Makereres and the Cambridges.

The PRO contains public records that span an unbroken period from the 11th century to the present. It is this mountain of paper, which of course represents an exceedingly small proportion of the human actions that occurred during those 1000 years that looms over today’s official actions. Its foundational assumption is of a linear progression, in which every (super)man has a role to play ushering a trans-generational narrative onward, higher, toward the end of the world (a heaven or a hell.) As has increasingly become the case, everywhere I look and much of what I hear in this most secular of societies is deeply religious; this being the case as well in socialist systems that retained the very same sense of an unerring march toward an end-point. How else could one justify such teleology when a truly secular system of intellectual inquiry would I think more accurately regard history as characterized by discontinuity, rupture and lacking in an inherent direction?

What of those who have ‘no history’ in the sense that their archives only carry records spanning a couple of hundred years, if that, and even the efforts of the oral traditions investigator yield little knowledge of life a few centuries ago? How fitting it should be that it is in the very societies lacking the massive backlog of records that religious feeling is at its most intense. Perhaps all those prayer sessions in Jeevanjee Gardens and in the thousands of Kenyan churches are about building a history and even a nation. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…’ says the book of Genesis rushing onward to the creation of the world, of man and eventually of the nation of Israel which has been the idealized model for Christendom’s nations.

Whether indeed we Gentiles can graft ourselves into this history is supported by the epistle of Paul and Galatians which promise that Kenyan Christians can in fact become a ‘new Israel’. Perhaps this is why when I visit my grandma’s digs in Nyeri I encounter frequent signage on churches and roadside posters proclaiming a New Israel to be at hand. These in the context of history as a narrative with its spiritual beginnings and endings (parallel – and so perhaps inspired by – the birth and death of the individual) imply that the popular history of Kenya mostly exists in the charismatic and not bureaucratic-rational realm. Why I am saying all this? To merely suggest that the drive and the need for history in Kenya has found biblical soil to be more fertile than the archive and furthermore that this is what history has always been about anyway.

(I may also have written this post because I wish this to be so, so that I can stay out of the archives:-))

BTW: If you are not a Eastern European mercenary leading commando raids on the Standard Newspaper, and therefore frown on such antics, please send an email to State House Kenya (president@statehousekenya.go.ke) expressing your opposition to the events of recent days. Also, take a look at a great post in Thinker’s Room on the subject.

The bitter tears shed when I compare my trip from home to Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta Airport and from London’s Heathrow to my flat.

Back to the African Bullets & Honey monster after more than a month away from its ravenous hunger. I only got back to London early this morning after a month in Nairobi. Allow me to once again – because I believe I have blogged about this before – give you a glimpse of the inevitable culture shock that I always have when I compare the trip from our Nairobi home to Jomo Kenyatta Airport and then from Heathrow to my London apartment.

Nairobi 28th February:

Flight leaving at 23:25 meaning that I am meant to check in at 21.25 latest. But of course I only leave the house at 21.15 in a two-car convoy carrying friend, sister and mother – well three cars when you include my other buddy meeting us at the airport. This little posse is not only an outpouring of love; the airport trip to the middle class Kenyan, since the economic hard times of the 1990s, is like a confirmation that an escape route exists to hope, to a rebirth, a fresh start. The first time you are escorted to it, there are tears of sorrow at your departure, others of envy at the supposedly better life you will have abroad. We get to the airport at 21.45 and spend the next 15 minutes or so chatting by the curbside and saying repeated goodbyes that are interrupted by some comment. Then the hugs, the misty eyes (none by yours truly; I am a tear-less ninja except when it is time to blog when I shed with the sheer frustration caused by the AB&H monster’s cruel hold of me) and the final shouted goodbyes. Naturally, being the African-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder, I hate flying British Airways and avoid it whenever I can. Not this time though, revolutionary principles must after all yield to cheap internet fares. Imagine my surprise – and disappointment – when with my teeth bared to attack any sign of British condescension, the manager instead decides to upgrade me to premium economy. Next stop: the friendly immigration officer who admonishes me not to stay ‘out there’ too long. After a cup of java coffee and a slice of carrot cake, I move to my seat next to a development consultant who (I swear this) spends the eight hours of the flight reading a long, hair-pullingly boring development report. He must be worth every penny, that poor SOB. But this is a story for another day…

London 1st March:

Pilot:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain, thank you for flying British Airways.’

‘London today is quite cold, under zero degrees.’

‘We hope you have enjoyed our service and that you will enjoy your stay (you poor suckers hahahahahahaha…)’

THE IMMIGRATION INTERVIEW:

‘Where are you from?’ (peering intently at old stamps and visas. You are one of them: the illegal immigrant, the African with a behind crammed with ecstasy…or at least cocaine or heroin.)

‘What do you do here?’

‘I am a student’

‘Of what?’

‘War studies.’

‘What? Did you say war, like fighting?’

‘Yes, I study how to yank out immigration eyeballs with the peace sign…I bet you always thought the sign (as in ‘peace dude’) was … like, um, peaceful. Right? Well let me tell you something you poor, 5.30AM African harassing, passport caressing, squinty eyed, nose picking-with finger-that-then-touches-my-passport-photo-bureaucrat, the peace sign is kung fu for the eye-stab move. Bet you didn’t know that. And yes, I have no intention of remaining in your country forever when there is a three-car convoy filled with beery people waiting to pick me up at JKA.’

I wish that is what I had said because the European IMMIGRATION INTERVIEW is an absurd, hypocrisy by a west that speaks the talk of open boundaries to goods and capital when it cannot stand the same for people. The 21st century meeting point between African Livingstones and Lugards and Europe’s petty gate-keeping chiefs. Just beyond the immigration officer’s shoulder are little offices which if you ever have the misfortune of visiting always have a scared looking African seated patiently awaiting some grim fate. You don’t make conversation since it is clear to both of you that the other is a criminal and must be consorted with. But I digress.

‘How long were you away?’

‘Too briefly, I wish it had been forever.’

‘When does your doctoral course end?’

‘When the sun burns itself out; when the hens come home to roost; when the Fat Woman sings; just a moment before the grim reaper strikes me down; (sobbing) why must you ask such hurtful questions?’

‘Welcome.’

Illegal Nigerian Taxi Driver at Arrivals Terminal:

‘Taxi? Looking for taxi?’ (whispered with averted gaze that immediately pulls you into the kind of conspiracy that the IMMIGRATION OFFICER suspected you of being mixed up in.)

‘Yes. I want to go to Elephant and Castle. How much will it be?’

‘Forty pounds alone, thirty pounds if you wait for me to pick up another passenger.’

(I realise why this negotiation always discomfits me: it feels like I am a john trying to pick up a prostitute so – not that I would know what that is all about by the way.)

As I stand trying to decide whether this is a better deal than lugging two large suitcases up and down stairways, seating for an hour in a cold tube train and the ten minutes walk from the station to my door, another taxi driver sidles up to me, trying not to be noticed by the first one who is shouting into his mobile phone.

‘Where are you going?’ he asks ‘I will be cheap, cheap.’

‘Elephant and Castle’

‘Ok, thirty five pounds. We go?’

‘Sure, but only for thirty’

‘Fine, fine. Go to that elevator there and I will meet you inside. Don’t tell him that you are coming with me.’

Struck by guilt, reeling from the cold, bumping shoulders with angry looking people who never meet your eye and lugging my massive bags, I limp after him to the taxi. A traitor and a cheat within 30 minutes of getting to London, and feeling what a john must feel: tawdry, embarrassed and broke.

The ride takes an hour in traffic and I read a newspaper whose headline announces that the European Union has just introduced legislation that kids as old as eleven will have to be in car safety seats or fines of upto £500 can be levied on the driver. I have arrived. Back to the fire.

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi; buy an African farmer a chicken or a goat

There is always something new out of Africa. The latest being the website lastminute.com offering you, its customer, a chance to ‘buy a sheep, a goat or some chickens from FARM AFRICA.’ (I quote directly off their website) As you make last ditch vacation plans, you may also have a last minute change of heart about the dollar-a-day continent.

Imagine how good you will feel when you add a good deed to your vacation. ‘Not only will you be helping a worthy cause like poor African farmers or abandoned kitties (emphasis mine), but your lucky recipient will receive a gift pack with information about the charity and a unique gift to open on their special day.’

But lastminute.com does more than rouse your conscience, it desires to empower you. ‘So you’re not Gordon Brown and you can’t cancel the debt of the Third World. But with lastminute.com and FARM FRIENDS you have the chance to do something amazing, just by buying a gift for a friend (or even for yourself). You can choose a sheep, a goat or a brood of chickens. Of course, they won’t be delivered to you or the person you’re buying the gift for. Instead, they’ll get a really cute model of the chosen animal, while Farm Africa will give the real animal to a poor African farmer, who is struggling to feed his family. Just a few pounds buys the greatest gift of all – a happier, healthier future. A goat, for example, provides milk to fight-off malnutrition and any excess can be sold to pay for medicine or schoolbooks.’

Remember it is not just the right thing to do, it is also fun and educational. Or to let lastminute.com express it more accurately, ‘it’s a unique and fun present that also helps an African farmer feed his children. When you buy an animal, the recipient receives a FARM FRIENDS pack including a miniature sheep, goat or chicken, more information on how the real animals are helping poor farmers in Africa and most importantly, the knowledge that you are making a huge difference for someone in need.’

Out of Africa there is always something new and that never ages no matter how often it is repeated.

Is my cucu’s cucu guilty of participating in the slave trade?

Is my cucu’s cucu guilty of benefiting from the slave trade? Do I carry the guilt of those that did? I just read a great post by Keguro and may have forever annoyed him by writing such a long comment that I have made it into a post here.

I am confused about how to apportion guilt over the slave trade accurately so I do not let myself off the hook when I should be on it or hang myself when I shouldn’t. I lived in the States for a dozen years and in that time was closest to black folks in terms of my politics and my social life. Every once in a while the slavery question would come up emotionally: why had Africans such as my ancestors sold our brothers to plantation hell? It is obviously an issue that even today evokes pain in some descendents of slaves so let me try delicately offering some thoughts that I have.

My family hails from central Kenya, most of it is Gikuyu and a few are Maasai. As best as I know, neither of these two groups participated in the slave trade, either as captives or capturers. Of course tribes were never the isolated, static groupings that we think them today so it is well possible some Gikuyus or Maasais did participate. But we do know that the peoples living in the Mt. Kenya region could not be compared to the Kingdom of Dahomey – in present-day Benin – which aggressively captured and sold neighbouring people to slavers. Among the Gikuyu-speaking people, slavery was rare; it was unlike parts of Sudan or Angola or the Congo where slavery, both for internal exploitation and export, was widely practiced. What are we to do about those peoples that did not raid others for slaves or even those whose sole addition to the trade were as victims? Are their descendents also guilty of slavery since they are African? This is the reason that the words Africa and African have become increasingly confusing to me.

During the period of the slave trade, the only people who constantly referred to the African were Europeans – they were also the ones that had invented the word. Few people on the continent at that time had the notion of belonging to such a political or cultural community. Yet the debate over guilt revolves around questions such as, ‘should Africans apologise for their role in the slave trade?’ What confuses further is that the people who were captured – to use our all-encompassing language –were themselves African. For every soldier acting on the orders of Dahomey’s kings to capture slaves, there was a family that lost a son, a father or a mother. There were those who died during the raid, on the march, in the holds of a ship plying the Middle Passage and on the plantations of the Americas, Middle Eastern homes and European farms. Victims of a brutality whose painful echo still reverberates not only in the Americas, but also in the vast stretches of the Congo and Angola that remain depopulated to this day.

How exactly should this debate over guilt proceed? What would help bring closure to the descendents of slaves who demand a reckoning? I do not know. But I suggest that one of the actions that the present day people in Africa (I think we are stuck with this word at least in my lifetime) can do is to ensure that the slavery that is still alive and well across some of the Sahel zone countries like Mauritania is done away with. Surely there are few ways of demonstrating our opposition to this evil better than ensuring that it is wiped out in our time.

For better or worse, nationalists and anticolonialists adopted the African label from the very people that they were struggling against. In their desire for a unity that would further their cause, they took up the word European imperialists used to simplify the enormous diversity of the continent into a few useful stereotypes (the Romans came first, saying of the continent: Ex Africa semper aliquid novi – there is always something new out of Africa.) The African to the European of the slave trade was stupid, childlike, savage or docile, and lacked a soul. He could not be counted a member of the human race, and was due none of its civilised considerations or the grace of the Christian God (btw, the anti slavery movement in Britain acquired momentum only after its lobby argued that Africans had souls too.) The Africans to the Panafricanists were also a single community with a few (positive) stereotypes that allowed them to wage a struggle against colonial notions of European superiority. Yet since Europeans surrendered the reins of government, the idea of African exceptionalism has had power-crazed autocrats as its self-appointed guardians. Removed from the needs of an anti-colonial struggle, the idea has been used to promote a bloody-minded vision of nationhood at odds with its citizens. I refer here to the Mobutus, the later Nkrumah and the beat-them-and-truck-them Nyerere, not to mention the present ‘African revolution’ of Mugabe which involves destroying the homes of poor folks in Harare and torturing the ones who dare protest. Whoever said sticks and stones but not words may break bones apparently never felt the outcome of tear-the-flesh-off-bone words like Africa and Africans. But, I digress.

My point is that we are stuck with this African identity as a good, at least at the height of the anti-colonial movements, and a bad when it comes to the historical guilt of the slave trade and the postcolonial period. What I wonder about is how to reconcile these contradictory Africas of the mind (to paraphrase Lonsdale’s ‘Mau Maus of the mind’.) Which Africa was guilty of the slave trade? Is it possible that there were communities in Africa that did not participate in the trade? What position should their descendents adopt in the present debate? Do Africans think they are Africans when they are away from the microphone and the page or when they are not speaking to Europe or in reference to it? Can you create a pan-nation united by its past and present oppression and deprivation? Does being chained in Benin by the kings of Dahomey; whipped in apartheid South Africa by Afrikaners; shot at in Darfur by Janjaweed militias; enjoying Fela Kuti’s music; patronised by Tony ’scar of humanity’ Blair’s Commission for Africa; and being governed by a dictator who attends African Union meetings make you an African? Is there a moral dimension to African citizenship when it is not protesting European action?

Where is the common moral and memory thread that will allow us to consider the tragedy of the slave trade from a moral perspective that offers answers to the descendents of slaves and slavers?

Is my cucu’s cucu guilty of participating in the slave trade?

Is my cucu’s cucu guilty of benefiting from the slave trade? Do I carry the guilt of those that did? I just read a great post by Keguro and may have forever annoyed him by writing such a long comment that I have made it into a post here.

I am confused about how to apportion guilt over the slave trade accurately so I do not let myself off the hook when I should be on it or hang myself when I shouldn’t. I lived in the States for a dozen years and in that time was closest to black folks in terms of my politics and my social life. Every once in a while the slavery question would come up emotionally: why had Africans such as my ancestors sold our brothers to plantation hell? It is obviously an issue that even today evokes pain in some descendents of slaves so let me try delicately offering some thoughts that I have.

My family hails from central Kenya, most of it is Gikuyu and a few are Maasai. As best as I know, neither of these two groups participated in the slave trade, either as captives or capturers. Of course tribes were never the isolated, static groupings that we think them today so it is well possible some Gikuyus or Maasais did participate. But we do know that the peoples living in the Mt. Kenya region could not be compared to the Kingdom of Dahomey – in present-day Benin – which aggressively captured and sold neighbouring people to slavers. Among the Gikuyu-speaking people, slavery was rare; it was unlike parts of Sudan or Angola or the Congo where slavery, both for internal exploitation and export, was widely practiced. What are we to do about those peoples that did not raid others for slaves or even those whose sole addition to the trade were as victims? Are their descendents also guilty of slavery since they are African? This is the reason that the words Africa and African have become increasingly confusing to me.

During the period of the slave trade, the only people who constantly referred to the African were Europeans – they were also the ones that had invented the word. Few people on the continent at that time had the notion of belonging to such a political or cultural community. Yet the debate over guilt revolves around questions such as, ‘should Africans apologise for their role in the slave trade?’ What confuses further is that the people who were captured – to use our all-encompassing language –were themselves African. For every soldier acting on the orders of Dahomey’s kings to capture slaves, there was a family that lost a son, a father or a mother. There were those who died during the raid, on the march, in the holds of a ship plying the Middle Passage and on the plantations of the Americas, Middle Eastern homes and European farms. Victims of a brutality whose painful echo still reverberates not only in the Americas, but also in the vast stretches of the Congo and Angola that remain depopulated to this day.

How exactly should this debate over guilt proceed? What would help bring closure to the descendents of slaves who demand a reckoning? I do not know. But I suggest that one of the actions that the present day people in Africa (I think we are stuck with this word at least in my lifetime) can do is to ensure that the slavery that is still alive and well across some of the Sahel zone countries like Mauritania is done away with. Surely there are few ways of demonstrating our opposition to this evil better than ensuring that it is wiped out in our time.

For better or worse, nationalists and anticolonialists adopted the African label from the very people that they were struggling against. In their desire for a unity that would further their cause, they took up the word European imperialists used to simplify the enormous diversity of the continent into a few useful stereotypes (the Romans came first, saying of the continent: Ex Africa semper aliquid novi – there is always something new out of Africa.) The African to the European of the slave trade was stupid, childlike, savage or docile, and lacked a soul. He could not be counted a member of the human race, and was due none of its civilised considerations or the grace of the Christian God (btw, the anti slavery movement in Britain acquired momentum only after its lobby argued that Africans had souls too.) The Africans to the Panafricanists were also a single community with a few (positive) stereotypes that allowed them to wage a struggle against colonial notions of European superiority. Yet since Europeans surrendered the reins of government, the idea of African exceptionalism has had power-crazed autocrats as its self-appointed guardians. Removed from the needs of an anti-colonial struggle, the idea has been used to promote a bloody-minded vision of nationhood at odds with its citizens. I refer here to the Mobutus, the later Nkrumah and the beat-them-and-truck-them Nyerere, not to mention the present ‘African revolution’ of Mugabe which involves destroying the homes of poor folks in Harare and torturing the ones who dare protest. Whoever said sticks and stones but not words may break bones apparently never felt the outcome of tear-the-flesh-off-bone words like Africa and Africans. But, I digress.

My point is that we are stuck with this African identity as a good, at least at the height of the anti-colonial movements, and a bad when it comes to the historical guilt of the slave trade and the postcolonial period. What I wonder about is how to reconcile these contradictory Africas of the mind (to paraphrase Lonsdale’s ‘Mau Maus of the mind’.) Which Africa was guilty of the slave trade? Is it possible that there were communities in Africa that did not participate in the trade? What position should their descendents adopt in the present debate? Do Africans think they are Africans when they are away from the microphone and the page or when they are not speaking to Europe or in reference to it? Can you create a pan-nation united by its past and present oppression and deprivation? Does being chained in Benin by the kings of Dahomey; whipped in apartheid South Africa by Afrikaners; shot at in Darfur by Janjaweed militias; enjoying Fela Kuti’s music; patronised by Tony ’scar of humanity’ Blair’s Commission for Africa; and being governed by a dictator who attends African Union meetings make you an African? Is there a moral dimension to African citizenship when it is not protesting European action?

Where is the common moral and memory thread that will allow us to consider the tragedy of the slave trade from a moral perspective that offers answers to the descendents of slaves and slavers?

Some Email Considerations on the African Bush and its European Saviours

Below are some emails that I exchanged with one of my closest friends (PK) just after reading James Miller’s great essay, ‘Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty,’ (in Political Theory, Vol. 18, #3, August, 1990.) It is a bit of a switch from the kind of digressions and rants that have appeared here in the past but may be enjoyable to some folks…

MMK: The way Nietzsche (and later Foucault) saw this place has come to pass guy. Is there any doubt that London and Europe have perfected control and the shrinking of the human space by growing the mechanisms of mercy and ‘rational’ policy? And that we, on the other hand, still exist in a place where people are bigger than the institutions that seek to extend control over them. That is where all our shit comes from and also the glorious ability to actually be and feel power -not ‘influence’ as they call it out here.

As Europeans have in the past few generations created their world of rights and utility, they have cast man down. Every man so that even the highest in the land are ruled by mechanisms that are wholly divorced from all. It is what makes you feel that everyone here is arranging themselves vis-a-vis a process, an institution or a set template. The very process of building the modern penal system was reflected in institutions outside it. The goal as Morpheus in The Matrix said: control. But it would have been preferable if this edifice was built by conspiracy, by a king-like figure that yearns for control. That way, it would have a human scale and there would only be a few necks to chop through. But no, this situation is like layers of concrete laid by different generations so that there is now no going back to dig through to the person anymore. No wonder there was this desire to build thousands of nukes. Deep inside I think Europeans are deeply suicidal, they want it all to end but they just cannot get beyond the safety mechanisms that they have built into their societies.

This is what I think is so awesome (in the biblical sense of the word) about this thing we call Africa. It refuses to be brought to heel in the most infuriating and dispiriting fashion. The bush just keeps growing back no matter what the European build on it or at least this is their version of events. Their dreams refuse to take here since the structures that they have grown on their soil can hardly last a generation on ours.

I was watching a recreation of the murder of Lord Errol the other night. Done by the BBC with that cultured, ‘we are going to understand our Africa’ tone. For the first time I actually felt sorry for Europeans who do the whole Africa thing. Their dreams are so flimsy and yet they always start out with so much faith that they can write themselves into the blank darkness and become what they could not in their country. No matter how much life they see or experience around them, whether good or bad, they persist with the conceit that it is not fully human, that it awaits their building it into existence. But it crushes them and in Happy Valley they basically lost it, and have been losing it ever since. All manner of methods have been brought to bear to grow this dream in the ‘bush’: guns, conquest, aid, intervention, non-intervention … everything, and yet it all keeps failing. Africa is their last indulgence. The last kick of their humanist conceits and the place keeps responding by kicking them in the balls. And the pain is probably made worse by the fact that in fact Africans might actually genuinely want to be down with the program, we mean the European no harm after all. We even have many of us trying to grow his little project with him and sometimes for him. But even this won’t take.

Just reading the Miller piece left me with such a satisfied calm. I felt that there was no crisis really in our part of the world. There are problems for sure, but no crisis whatsoever. To be a little Zen, the shit will go as the shit goes and it is as simple as that. Is that too Senegalese?

PK: Guy, remember me texting you last December from Club Afrique in London and saying that perhaps all Foucault needed was a dose of Lingala and a Congolese prostitute to show him in real terms what ‘limit experience’ is to the European — or what he defines as taking shit to the very edge.

The most acerbic criticism, the harshest assessments always come from people on the inside. Or more specifically, people on the outside-in, the silent observers of The Project, any project, the ones always assumed to be part of it but who in reality are deeply critical of it by virtue of their positioning. However, they know of no other. They adopt an anti-language whose deepest metaphors and most illuminating insights, whose zinging idioms are constructed to provide insights into the thing they most detest, which is also they only thing they know: The Project.

Africans who read Foucault love him because he articulated viscerally felt insights. He is no surprise to an African who knows it well but has always wondered where it comes from. But unlike Foucault, we have ways-out, ‘way-forwards’: Foucault’s preoccupation with reconciling his sex with his mind is what Eldridge Cleaver called the dilemma of the Omnipotent Administrator (man that black consciousness lingo was funky! I fear that Africans, in the States at least, have been absorbed into ‘The System’ and are now bland and mild-mannered and addicted to shopping malls). Did you ever read that shit? Juxtapose it to Foucault — it is cruel, angry, politically incorrect, misogynistic, and historically imprecise in places but always stabbing at the heart of African-existence. Anyway, Cleaver’s depiction of the Omnipotent Administrator is the white man as all head, no soul and no sex. He makes cruel stabs — ordinary today but probably deeply wounding then — about the European’s dead-man’s dance; his perpetual suspicion of sexual inadequacy — and by extension, the threat of the Supermasculine Menial.

All this sounds fairly banal today, even irrelevant. I was reading a 1976 Eldrige Cleaver interview in Transition and you can just feel the energy and dynamism of people living inside a project. When I hear the same terms used by the likes of X (a well known rights activist in Nairobi), they sound all rehearsed, as if she (and others) were playing at being adult.

You and I feel that frustration; how reduced, how small, the world gets when we receive the idea of project-completion, of final organisation, of last-man thoughts. And by the way, it’s happening everywhere. Re: the drought thing, and the quite genuine outrage of the public in sedentary-Kenya, an outrage underpinned by Mohammed Aminesque images of starving, fly-ridden children in strange, far-flung locations; in short, an outrage whose infrastructure looks disturbingly like white-liberal concern a la Live Aid/Live Eight. Nobody of course questions why the famine happened or will happen again. It is considered a given that people in strange, non-sedentary locations — people who were not touched by the civilizing mission; whose MBA-quotient is sub-optimal — will starve. The problem, the outrage is about the fact that food aid did not arrive in time. That even after the establishment of ‘early-warning systems’ the government was not able to respond in time.

What I’m trying to say is that we are all being sucked into a last-man thought system. Last as a universe constructed by a narrow-minded little bourgeois whose black holes consist of Friday-night infidelities, credit-card debts, SUV desires and MBA ambitions.

MMK: Let us continue. I need to find me some Cleaver. Now!

The madness in this thing is when Africans try and get with it in the usual babi, civil society ways. They become worse than mad men, they become fools. Did you read the details of Damien’s public execution in Miller and the intimate ritual between ruler and ruled that was playing out? The paradoxical freedom of the victim from all power directed at his intimate self?

Let us praise the bush if only ironically! And by this I do not mean a turn to the ‘primitive’ which as usual is all about the European template. I mean thank god I can listen to Lingala, tusker in hand in screwed Nairobi feeling bigger than all the mechanisms of the state erected to try and get one over on me. Yes, yes, I know that there are many victims and vulnerable people and all that claptrap that is the manna of what I will call the tyranny-by-humanist-increment crew.

Will get back to Cleaver and famines and Kenya in a second. Let me stay with our ostensible saviour for a while longer because after all we are supposed to be trying to be like him. Right? The European is being crushed beneath the layers of his humanist, rationalist and utilitarian institutions. These take aim, whether deliberately or not, at God, and the godliness in the human being, preferring rational man as godhead. Because they have judged themselves to be nothing more than unreasoning flesh straining against reason, while needing a creed of some kind to maintain social control to maintain control, they have built god-like institutions to rule. Each generation for the past century at least has added to the power of these institutions. Would I be going to far to say that politics here is the contest to determine who gets to add to the size and reach of the state-God?

The modern finds a rare recourse in the bedroom where he hopes to momentarily escape the jealous eye of the machines that control him. Words like freedom and society’s will or truth are all mere labels for mechanisms that are anything but. The European lives in the midst of giant conceits that separate his thought and word from their actual nature.

Back to the bedroom: freedom is in transgression, in the sexual fetishes that Foucault was so fascinated by. (Isn’t it funny how all fetishes are embraced by the transgression warriors except for what they call commodity or consumer fetishism?). There is no longer any possibility of freedom here, it is actually a meaningless word and better thought of as a chimera. I am not speaking here of political freedom, in the sense of freedom from dictatorship or the attainment of democracy, but rather the impulse to be free of the overwhelming conceits of the individual European’s society which him no room to breathe even while he proclaims it the peak of human achievement. How maddening it must be: to be told, and to hear yourself say, daily, that you are the richest, most humane, cleverest and nicest while feeling empty and put upon by all that you experience.

This morning, while commuting into the city, I found that the tube fare – for an 8 minute ride – had gone up by about 40% since I used the tube a week ago. Bus fare is also up and so is the congestion charge which was meant to discourage driving and be invested in better, cheaper public transport. On getting to the office in a fury, I tried ranting about the raises. In response, one guy suggested that surely there must be someone who is paying less therefore it is ok that he and I get to pay more! Another one blamed Thatcherite policies of privatization and was happy that Labour was finally investing in public services. Yet another constructive type wished that the public could join with the unions to stage a demonstration against the hikes. You see? There were plenty of reactions but none of anger at being made poorer and basically getting ripped off. I pulled a mini Black Man Rage saying that the people here have been broken. Only this Arabic woman jokingly advocated riots or for folks to crowd into buses and refuse to pay. None of the so-called ‘masters of the universe’ types like Blair can actually change anything here, seeing how all interests are aligned to leave standing only a massive depersonalized society-wide controls (Foucault’s govermentality?). You may as well buy a giant dildo and to use it on yourself. Transgression in the bedroom looks to be a way out, right? Turn to your nerve endings – when your nipples are burnt or your penis coated in burning wax – for momentary freedom from your institutional masters in the hope that they are not watching and might disapprove. But you know in truth that this is not the case because their regime is alive and well even in the heart of sexual sado-masochism which is now to be conducted with ‘safety words’, child-safety clamps and feathered whips. With every passing year, they shrug off and flatten the ancient religious and sexual hierarchies with a God at their head substituting them with a flat equality here on earth that they lord over as a new God who believes in nothing except reason and the need to destroy all hope in a human soul. The helplessness of it is must be crushing.

Oh yes, we Africans may go down in the face of some diseases and natural forces but here they are helpless at the root. Well fed in the belly and totally starving outside it. Yet even this binary set-up may be an illusion because it seems to promise that from one can emerge the other but this may only be true in the vast sweep of history and not in the individual life. Thus the constant refrain in the West of ‘what history will say’ about one action of the powerful or the other; it is yet another of the little conceits that are a scream for help by a people so helplessly drowned that they attempt to live in a single life an entire history and futurestory of mankind. Death is what is scary and made so much more so because this ‘modernist’ project or rather projects, for they are many atop and alongside each other, has rejected at its root the possibility of human transcendence.

The European is trapped in a world that he wants to imagine is of his making when he is actually just the recipient of his forefathers’ addition to the very rope that is holding him down. He is caught between pride at the awesome machine that rules him (‘we are the greatest, the best, the superior’) and a mighty desire to escape it (‘let us go to Africa’, noble savages, Maasais, Save The Children). He wants nothing better than pull others in with him so that in doing so, he momentarily escapes. This is where those conversations by the old Africa hand come in. How wonderful and freeing was the world that they had come to conquer and dominate. They had (have) a genuine love for a thing they never shared in. Even in the darkest heart of Africa, their soul was imprisoned in the light of a modernist prison and their simultaneous dream of freedom and dominance would not take. The bush during colonialism and especially after its short reign kept growing back. They were caught between an unfeeling pride for their prison and its soul crushing weight. The few who attempted went mad, and when you speak to them about anything, be it Maasai art or wildlife, and are not coming from their direction, they just sound either foolish or childish.

If only the African could fight this thing, fight to join the moderns. But the African who joins in that game, usually of the babi middle class, civil society persuasion, ‘we can be just like the west’ game, is functionally insane in my opinion. He is driven to join what others are trying to escape, so taken with the narrow freedoms that he cannot spot the machine that is crushing the life out of his human/animal/black/female/gay/landless/vulnerable/disabled/gender outlaw/anti-ageism/welsh/Palestinian/Israeli/Panafrican/labour/capitalist rights colleagues. He little understands that these values are better judged as Trojan Horses whether or not they have universal merit. Many indeed do, but it was never about these rights. It has always been about the institutional mechanism that shall carry them. The Bible is very hip to this stuff and gives a good example in Matthews. When Jesus was in the desert fasting, the Devil came to him and tried tempting him to eat. Now you know the Devil could have hooked him up something to eat, as he did to Adam and Eve, but Jesus chooses hunger. The Devil and in our case the rights crew come in with plenty of temptations but the inner goal is of robbing you of all life. And like I was saying, what makes this so much worse is that there is no conspiracy. It is a wholly impersonal historical epoch that in all probability shall not last. The European is already held captive by it, and we in the bush have been targets for the last few hundred years. Thank God that the bush is going to stay strong in my lifetime.

The African Bush and its European Saviours

Below are some emails that I exchanged with one of my closest friends (PK) just after reading James Miller’s great essay, ‘Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty,’ (in Political Theory, Vol. 18, #3, August, 1990.) It is a bit of a switch from the kind of digressions and rants that have appeared here in the past but may be enjoyable to some folks…

MMK: The way Nietzsche (and later Foucault) saw this place has come to pass guy. Is there any doubt that London and Europe have perfected control and the shrinking of the human space by growing the mechanisms of mercy and ‘rational’ policy? And that we, on the other hand, still exist in a place where people are bigger than the institutions that seek to extend control over them. That is where all our shit comes from and also the glorious ability to actually be and feel power -not ‘influence’ as they call it out here.

As Europeans have in the past few generations created their world of rights and utility, they have cast man down. Every man so that even the highest in the land are ruled by mechanisms that are wholly divorced from all. It is what makes you feel that everyone here is arranging themselves vis-a-vis a process, an institution or a set template. The very process of building the modern penal system was reflected in institutions outside it. The goal as Morpheus in The Matrix said: control. But it would have been preferable if this edifice was built by conspiracy, by a king-like figure that yearns for control. That way, it would have a human scale and there would only be a few necks to chop through. But no, this situation is like layers of concrete laid by different generations so that there is now no going back to dig through to the person anymore. No wonder there was this desire to build thousands of nukes. Deep inside I think Europeans are deeply suicidal, they want it all to end but they just cannot get beyond the safety mechanisms that they have built into their societies.

This is what I think is so awesome (in the biblical sense of the word) about this thing we call Africa. It refuses to be brought to heel in the most infuriating and dispiriting fashion. The bush just keeps growing back no matter what the European build on it or at least this is their version of events. Their dreams refuse to take here since the structures that they have grown on their soil can hardly last a generation on ours.

I was watching a recreation of the murder of Lord Errol the other night. Done by the BBC with that cultured, ‘we are going to understand our Africa’ tone. For the first time I actually felt sorry for Europeans who do the whole Africa thing. Their dreams are so flimsy and yet they always start out with so much faith that they can write themselves into the blank darkness and become what they could not in their country. No matter how much life they see or experience around them, whether good or bad, they persist with the conceit that it is not fully human, that it awaits their building it into existence. But it crushes them and in Happy Valley they basically lost it, and have been losing it ever since. All manner of methods have been brought to bear to grow this dream in the ‘bush’: guns, conquest, aid, intervention, non-intervention … everything, and yet it all keeps failing. Africa is their last indulgence. The last kick of their humanist conceits and the place keeps responding by kicking them in the balls. And the pain is probably made worse by the fact that in fact Africans might actually genuinely want to be down with the program, we mean the European no harm after all. We even have many of us trying to grow his little project with him and sometimes for him. But even this won’t take.

Just reading the Miller piece left me with such a satisfied calm. I felt that there was no crisis really in our part of the world. There are problems for sure, but no crisis whatsoever. To be a little Zen, the shit will go as the shit goes and it is as simple as that. Is that too Senegalese?

PK: Guy, remember me texting you last December from Club Afrique in London and saying that perhaps all Foucault needed was a dose of Lingala and a Congolese prostitute to show him in real terms what ‘limit experience’ is to the European — or what he defines as taking shit to the very edge.

The most acerbic criticism, the harshest assessments always come from people on the inside. Or more specifically, people on the outside-in, the silent observers of The Project, any project, the ones always assumed to be part of it but who in reality are deeply critical of it by virtue of their positioning. However, they know of no other. They adopt an anti-language whose deepest metaphors and most illuminating insights, whose zinging idioms are constructed to provide insights into the thing they most detest, which is also they only thing they know: The Project.

Africans who read Foucault love him because he articulated viscerally felt insights. He is no surprise to an African who knows it well but has always wondered where it comes from. But unlike Foucault, we have ways-out, ‘way-forwards’: Foucault’s preoccupation with reconciling his sex with his mind is what Eldridge Cleaver called the dilemma of the Omnipotent Administrator (man that black consciousness lingo was funky! I fear that Africans, in the States at least, have been absorbed into ‘The System’ and are now bland and mild-mannered and addicted to shopping malls). Did you ever read that shit? Juxtapose it to Foucault — it is cruel, angry, politically incorrect, misogynistic, and historically imprecise in places but always stabbing at the heart of African-existence. Anyway, Cleaver’s depiction of the Omnipotent Administrator is the white man as all head, no soul and no sex. He makes cruel stabs — ordinary today but probably deeply wounding then — about the European’s dead-man’s dance; his perpetual suspicion of sexual inadequacy — and by extension, the threat of the Supermasculine Menial.

All this sounds fairly banal today, even irrelevant. I was reading a 1976 Eldrige Cleaver interview in Transition and you can just feel the energy and dynamism of people living inside a project. When I hear the same terms used by the likes of X (a well known rights activist in Nairobi), they sound all rehearsed, as if she (and others) were playing at being adult.

You and I feel that frustration; how reduced, how small, the world gets when we receive the idea of project-completion, of final organisation, of last-man thoughts. And by the way, it’s happening everywhere. Re: the drought thing, and the quite genuine outrage of the public in sedentary-Kenya, an outrage underpinned by Mohammed Aminesque images of starving, fly-ridden children in strange, far-flung locations; in short, an outrage whose infrastructure looks disturbingly like white-liberal concern a la Live Aid/Live Eight. Nobody of course questions why the famine happened or will happen again. It is considered a given that people in strange, non-sedentary locations — people who were not touched by the civilizing mission; whose MBA-quotient is sub-optimal — will starve. The problem, the outrage is about the fact that food aid did not arrive in time. That even after the establishment of ‘early-warning systems’ the government was not able to respond in time.

What I’m trying to say is that we are all being sucked into a last-man thought system. Last as a universe constructed by a narrow-minded little bourgeois whose black holes consist of Friday-night infidelities, credit-card debts, SUV desires and MBA ambitions.

MMK: Let us continue. I need to find me some Cleaver. Now!

The madness in this thing is when Africans try and get with it in the usual babi, civil society ways. They become worse than mad men, they become fools. Did you read the details of Damien’s public execution in Miller and the intimate ritual between ruler and ruled that was playing out? The paradoxical freedom of the victim from all power directed at his intimate self?

Let us praise the bush if only ironically! And by this I do not mean a turn to the ‘primitive’ which as usual is all about the European template. I mean thank god I can listen to Lingala, tusker in hand in screwed Nairobi feeling bigger than all the mechanisms of the state erected to try and get one over on me. Yes, yes, I know that there are many victims and vulnerable people and all that claptrap that is the manna of what I will call the tyranny-by-humanist-increment crew.

Will get back to Cleaver and famines and Kenya in a second. Let me stay with our ostensible saviour for a while longer because after all we are supposed to be trying to be like him. Right? The European is being crushed beneath the layers of his humanist, rationalist and utilitarian institutions. These take aim, whether deliberately or not, at God, and the godliness in the human being, preferring rational man as godhead. Because they have judged themselves to be nothing more than unreasoning flesh straining against reason, while needing a creed of some kind to maintain social control to maintain control, they have built god-like institutions to rule. Each generation for the past century at least has added to the power of these institutions. Would I be going to far to say that politics here is the contest to determine who gets to add to the size and reach of the state-God?

The modern finds a rare recourse in the bedroom where he hopes to momentarily escape the jealous eye of the machines that control him. Words like freedom and society’s will or truth are all mere labels for mechanisms that are anything but. The European lives in the midst of giant conceits that separate his thought and word from their actual nature.

Back to the bedroom: freedom is in transgression, in the sexual fetishes that Foucault was so fascinated by. (Isn’t it funny how all fetishes are embraced by the transgression warriors except for what they call commodity or consumer fetishism?). There is no longer any possibility of freedom here, it is actually a meaningless word and better thought of as a chimera. I am not speaking here of political freedom, in the sense of freedom from dictatorship or the attainment of democracy, but rather the impulse to be free of the overwhelming conceits of the individual European’s society which him no room to breathe even while he proclaims it the peak of human achievement. How maddening it must be: to be told, and to hear yourself say, daily, that you are the richest, most humane, cleverest and nicest while feeling empty and put upon by all that you experience.

This morning, while commuting into the city, I found that the tube fare – for an 8 minute ride – had gone up by about 40% since I used the tube a week ago. Bus fare is also up and so is the congestion charge which was meant to discourage driving and be invested in better, cheaper public transport. On getting to the office in a fury, I tried ranting about the raises. In response, one guy suggested that surely there must be someone who is paying less therefore it is ok that he and I get to pay more! Another one blamed Thatcherite policies of privatization and was happy that Labour was finally investing in public services. Yet another constructive type wished that the public could join with the unions to stage a demonstration against the hikes. You see? There were plenty of reactions but none of anger at being made poorer and basically getting ripped off. I pulled a mini Black Man Rage saying that the people here have been broken. Only this Arabic woman jokingly advocated riots or for folks to crowd into buses and refuse to pay. None of the so-called ‘masters of the universe’ types like Blair can actually change anything here, seeing how all interests are aligned to leave standing only a massive depersonalized society-wide controls (Foucault’s govermentality?). You may as well buy a giant dildo and to use it on yourself. Transgression in the bedroom looks to be a way out, right? Turn to your nerve endings – when your nipples are burnt or your penis coated in burning wax – for momentary freedom from your institutional masters in the hope that they are not watching and might disapprove. But you know in truth that this is not the case because their regime is alive and well even in the heart of sexual sado-masochism which is now to be conducted with ‘safety words’, child-safety clamps and feathered whips. With every passing year, they shrug off and flatten the ancient religious and sexual hierarchies with a God at their head substituting them with a flat equality here on earth that they lord over as a new God who believes in nothing except reason and the need to destroy all hope in a human soul. The helplessness of it is must be crushing.

Oh yes, we Africans may go down in the face of some diseases and natural forces but here they are helpless at the root. Well fed in the belly and totally starving outside it. Yet even this binary set-up may be an illusion because it seems to promise that from one can emerge the other but this may only be true in the vast sweep of history and not in the individual life. Thus the constant refrain in the West of ‘what history will say’ about one action of the powerful or the other; it is yet another of the little conceits that are a scream for help by a people so helplessly drowned that they attempt to live in a single life an entire history and futurestory of mankind. Death is what is scary and made so much more so because this ‘modernist’ project or rather projects, for they are many atop and alongside each other, has rejected at its root the possibility of human transcendence.

The European is trapped in a world that he wants to imagine is of his making when he is actually just the recipient of his forefathers’ addition to the very rope that is holding him down. He is caught between pride at the awesome machine that rules him (‘we are the greatest, the best, the superior’) and a mighty desire to escape it (‘let us go to Africa’, noble savages, Maasais, Save The Children). He wants nothing better than pull others in with him so that in doing so, he momentarily escapes. This is where those conversations by the old Africa hand come in. How wonderful and freeing was the world that they had come to conquer and dominate. They had (have) a genuine love for a thing they never shared in. Even in the darkest heart of Africa, their soul was imprisoned in the light of a modernist prison and their simultaneous dream of freedom and dominance would not take. The bush during colonialism and especially after its short reign kept growing back. They were caught between an unfeeling pride for their prison and its soul crushing weight. The few who attempted went mad, and when you speak to them about anything, be it Maasai art or wildlife, and are not coming from their direction, they just sound either foolish or childish.

If only the African could fight this thing, fight to join the moderns. But the African who joins in that game, usually of the babi middle class, civil society persuasion, ‘we can be just like the west’ game, is functionally insane in my opinion. He is driven to join what others are trying to escape, so taken with the narrow freedoms that he cannot spot the machine that is crushing the life out of his human/animal/black/female/gay/landless/vulnerable/disabled/gender outlaw/anti-ageism/welsh/Palestinian/Israeli/Panafrican/labour/capitalist rights colleagues. He little understands that these values are better judged as Trojan Horses whether or not they have universal merit. Many indeed do, but it was never about these rights. It has always been about the institutional mechanism that shall carry them. The Bible is very hip to this stuff and gives a good example in Matthews. When Jesus was in the desert fasting, the Devil came to him and tried tempting him to eat. Now you know the Devil could have hooked him up something to eat, as he did to Adam and Eve, but Jesus chooses hunger. The Devil and in our case the rights crew come in with plenty of temptations but the inner goal is of robbing you of all life. And like I was saying, what makes this so much worse is that there is no conspiracy. It is a wholly impersonal historical epoch that in all probability shall not last. The European is already held captive by it, and we in the bush have been targets for the last few hundred years. Thank God that the bush is going to stay strong in my lifetime.

What is English honour I wonder?

Is there such a thing as English honour? I mean really, what is this thing bandied about in every film and novel about the English ruling classes? I only bring it up after watching the latter half of a 1960s TV adaptation of Kidnapped, the Robert Louis Stevenson novel. The word honor was uttered with such metronomic frequency that of course MMK having nothing better to do sat down for what turned out to be thorough entertainment. It seems that while the English cluck their tongues at today’s martyrdom-seeking types, they have had their very own home grown ones. But they have been of a middle class variety of honor and heroism that was on display in this film with all its obsessions with inheritance, social position and love/hate feelings for aristocratic authority. It was actually very funny if you will allow me to start laughing before I get to the punchline.

OK, to the film. Young and earnest David Balfour is kidnapped, sold into slavery and cheated out of his inheritance by a scheming uncle in eighteenth century Scotland. While on the run in the Scottish Highlands, he falls in with a Jacobite rebel, Alan Breck – who murders a local chieftain supporter of the occupant of the English throne – and Aileen, the daughter of the man wrongly accused of the murder. David bravely returns to Edinburgh where he faces down the Lord Advocate – the representative of the king and the highest authority in the land. He testifies that the accused is innocent, to which the Lord Advocate – who intends that the man should hang to avoid sectarian violence – admonishes him to not pursue this course. ‘Thousands will die for this one man, and Scotland will be destroyed’ he pleads (I paraphrase). Even David’s companions try to dissuade him arguing that he will only destroy his own life for a doomed cause. They eventually give up before his principled stand with one of them saying, ‘go and do your duty; and be hanged, if you must. Like a gentleman.’

Young David is all for the scaffold provided he tells the truth even if the innocent accused is guaranteed death and his country – ruled by the English – torn asunder. ‘Then let it fall, let the whole rotten Scotland fall so that an innocent man may go free,’ he tells the Lord Advocate. Very heroic and blood stirring stuff I was thinking as I watched. But then our David goes on to give his reason for standing by the truth. Not his growing love for Aileen or her father, the accused. No, his stand is based on a conversation he had as a boy with his father who told him ‘that the law is higher than any man, it bends to no one and truth is its keeper.’ It is at this moment that he also reveals that he would like to attend law school should he survive this test.

Our hero is willing to die for the law. To be more exact, he is willing to be tried by the same law that he knows will kill him. His great aspiration is to be joined with the institutions that the preceding 90 minutes of the film have spent showing us being applied dishonestly and violently in his country. David’s aspiration might be to become Lord Advocate. This is the peculiar nature of his honor which requires that he give death a wide embrace recognizing that what is killing him is what he loves. This honor which I think is English in its nature, and allows him to face a sad fate unflinchingly is an abstraction. It ignores villainies perpetrated on others in its name. It came to me that the English claim to the mantle of an honorable people is based not on their refusal to cheat or murder but because they have been willing to die for the conceit that their kind do not cheat or murder. Thus the heroes’ squares built for the redcoats who faced the Zulu Impis at Islandwana and shook hands before turning to face the final thrust of the assegai. Nothing needs be said of the murdering and raping that brought them to that impasse. What matters is that they died looking heavenward to a vanity that allowed them to pursue without brakes any brutal conduct against the Zulu. From the Somme to the Battle of Britain and the many other battlefields that are splattered with English blood, evil is washed clean by this sacrifice of the young. This is why the English hero can be a cad until the very last moment when he pulls off a spectacular save in the honor department. It is only in battle that the English are at their best when offered the opportunity to look away from the hells they have created toward an earthly heaven only reachable by dying.

Or could it be that the nature of all liberal heroism is to love the very alter that you are dying on as opposed to more religious varieties that urge matrydom for the sake of heaven? Perhaps this is why Kenyan politics nowadays give birth to few heroic actions into death: we do not believe in the alter (the state) that might demand our blood and have found ways into heaven that do not demand we destroy earthly institutions. But this is only to speculate and a bit wildly too.

Happy New Year!

Goosie goosie gander where shall I wander? To MMK’s belly?

Well, say it then, what did you do on Christmas day? At the last minute, having expected to have a quiet day, I decided to go the whole nine yards and engage in a feasting, gifting orgy. As usual the rush of the mob took me headlong with it and I was unable to resist the million ads and Santas lurking around every corner eyeing my wallet. On Saturday, there I was elbowing aside little old ladies at Borough Market to buy the last wild goose that was large enough and expensive enough to feed a small town. Having just re-watched some episodes of Brideshead Revisited, which in case you did not know is one long ode to alcohol consumption, I bought several bottles of suspiciously cheap champagne in keeping with my principles of quantity over quality and form over function.

For dinner we baked the wild goose marinated in tangerines, strawberries, red onions, garlic and clove powder among other spices. Then brown basmati rice; a sweet potato and leeks stuffing; spinach with mushrooms; a moist carrot cake made with dark sugar; all washed down with champagne. Is that a feast or is it a feast? I am so impressed with myself and I hope that my mother reads this post so that she can see that her son does more than fry eggs and toast bread.

In any case, visitors to ABH, I wish you a happy 2006. May your plans and dreams be realised or come much closer to fruition. Thank you for hanging with me.

Food Force: The UN video game that makes learning about aiding hungry people cool

To be on the edge nowadays you’ve got to be able to multi-task. For instance, your love of computer gaming can now be combined with your concern for starving people. Premiering here on Bullets & Honey is the United Nation World Food Program’s latest idea: Food Force. That’s right, the international gaming market is realising that a non-violent, educational video game that allows 8-13 year olds to step into the shoes of aid workers can become the latest craze. According to the WFP, a million kids have already downloaded the game. Here are some of its heroic characters:

Rachel Scott Age: 26
Nationality: American
Logistics Officer
‘Rachel was born into a ‘logistics’ family – her father has a small trucking business and her mother drives an ambulance. It was no surprise when Rachel decided to put her own logistical skills to use for WFP.

Angela Keane
Age: 41
Nationality: Irish
Appeals Officer
Angela was born in Ireland, but moved to New York with her family when she was only 2 years old. At school she specialised in economics and graduated in Business Administration. After successfully running her own Internet fundraising business she decided to switch careers and help WFP in its massive task of raising and managing funds for emergency operations.’

There is something for everyone in the game. For instance, by doing well in the Food Force Bowl challenge, you can get a chance t0 win tickets to Super Bowl XL in Detroit. Have fun is the message but do it responsibly and learn about Lucy.

‘…when Lucy’s sister died of AIDS two years ago, she was left more than a hectare of stony soil. The 22-year-old also inherited her sister’s disabled husband, seven young children, a goat and two ducks. The couple have since had three more children.’

‘Even with regular rains, Lucy struggled to produce enough food to feed 12 mouths, but last winter drought withered and strangled her crop long before harvest time. She showed us the remains, a short walk from her family’s stone hut, on the other side of a dried-up river bed. By June, Lucy had exhausted her total yield: two sacks of sorghum. Like most other subsistence farmers in the village, she turned to casual labour, crushing stones into gravel to sell on the roadside. There were few takers, and her neat, grey piles still line the dirt track.’

‘In August, with the price of maize soaring in the market, her family surviving on one meagre portion of maize porridge per day and her youngest child showing symptoms of kwashiorkor (severe protein malnutrition), Lucy approached her village chief and joined the monthly queues for WFP food aid at the local school. Queuing patiently under a burning sun, one of more than 1,000 hungry villagers, Lucy waits her turn before handing in her ration card and collecting a 50kg (7st 9lb) sack of maize. Somehow hoisting the dead weight on to her head, she walks the mile back to her hut.’

‘By the time she arrives, a trail of maize is running from a small split in the bag. Her children sweep up the granules as if they were gold dust. It is hard to imagine Lucy and her fellow villagers ever being more than hostages to disease and drought in such a harsh environment. But an hour up the road, at Chitsukwa village, there is another story that offers some hope for the future of southern Malawi – not to mention enough maize to feed Lucy’s village several times over. For three years Bishop Khado, a local farmer, refused to accept his fate, clinging to the dream of irrigation…’

Awesome dude! Join the Food Force team by linking up with Paul Tergat, the champion marathoner who you may not have known but as an eight-year-old pupil at Riwo Primary School in Kenya’s Rift Valley received food aid from WFP. And look what a difference that made.

It’s enough to bring a tear to the eye, isn’t it?

We’re going to get you simba, we’re going to get you! MUHAHAHA, MUHAHAHAH, MUHAHAHA!

“This is the plan: we will import 135 wild animals from Kenya, or 98% of the total, thus leaving behind only 3 old lions. Then we ship our haul to Bangkok where we will hang them from the rafters and slowly stick hot pins into their paws while depriving them of sleep. We’re going to get you simba, we’re going to get you! MUHAHAHA, MUHAHAHAH, MUHAHAHA!”

Forget corruption, forget political murders, tsunamis and terrorist bombings, there is a new scourge in Kenya: animals are suffering. The speak-to-power members of our ‘civil society’ are as ever ready to step to the breach and put a stop to injustice wherever it rears its ugly head. Word on the street is that in the past few months there have been night vigils held outside Hotel Intercontinental in Nairobi to protest against the sending of Kenyan wildlife to Thailand. Those Thais, you just know that they spend most of their time in Bangkok twirling their little brown thumbs and laughing maniacally as they invent unusual new tortures. Their record speaks for itself. In August 2004, for instance, there was an international uproar – at least among animal welfare groups – when 3 out of 115 orangutans died of pneumonia in a Bangkok zoo. Earlier, 32 ‘frightened, wide-eyed baby orangutans, many hugging each other’ were found in the same ‘cramped private Thai zoo’ (see story here). The zoo owners have much to answer for. There were clearly Crimes Against Primates being carried out on the premises. It might even have been that the 32 babies were being raised to become fighters in Bangkok’s famous orangutan boxing. The cruelty. Oh, the sheer mad, evil genius of it all.

They came to Nairobi in November to hoodwink us. Taking time off from his busy schedule of trying to deal with a small constitutional matter, declining national life expectancy, hunger, terrorist attacks, widespread crime, official corruption and a failed state just north of the border, our president took time to engage in the sophisticated arena of international geopolitics. Signing a solemn Memorandum of Understanding with Thai Prime Minister Thaskin Shinawatra, President Kibaki earned Kenya a cool 80 million shillings in return for sending the wild animals to a private zoo in Thailand. What was Mr. Shinawatra thinking? I mean c’mon. Clearly, his ambassador to Nairobi had not informed him that MOUs are really not the way to go in State House. But that is a matter for another discussion.

I demand that we require the Thais to sign and ratify the UN Convention Against Torture before Kenya sends animals to them. We do not want any more Abu Ghraibs after all. Imagine, if you have the courage, what fiendish plots our elands, dik dik and hippos could be subjected to. It makes me quail, yet I want to be true to my optimistic nature.

I have a dream that one day my nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all elephants, orangutans and little black boys are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the pavements of the Intercontinental, a great cause shall come to fruition: that the bad people who like doing bad things to wildlife will stop and be good and do good things. I have a dream that one day, one day, that I too shall drive a four wheel drive jeep to the national park, and that there, waiting with open arms, will be a Maasai warrior who shall join with me in sustainably loving nature. From the slopes of Mt Kenya to the palm trees of Lamu, I dream that this land will be emptied of its detritus of selfish humans who have transformed an oasis of noble beasts into a desert sweltering with the rot of poaching and tourism. My friends, I have a dream that our apes, fauna and snakes will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their hides or the texture of their scales, but by the amount of conservation funding they attract to our shores. I have a dream today. By any means necessary. Yeah.

Signs that the Devil roams among us and that the Kenyan nation shall be born in church

A word of advice from the get-go: enjoy your beer now and wear your mini-skirts often because such joys – if that is what they are to you – might not last long.

Let me explain by introducing my new favourite pastor, Rev. Dr David Githii, head of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA). He argues that Kenyan government buildings harbour many satanic symbols and that Kenya is a country reeling under ‘the great influence of devil worship’. He was recently quoted in the Standard saying that “the two snakes at the entrance to Parliament, the huge Masonic star at the entrance to the High Court, the frogs and tortoise signs in the High Court must be demolished.” Presumably because they are signs of the devil. Nor did his investigations into the insidious nature of Lucifer stop there. It turns out that Kenya’s national rallying call, harambee which means pulling together, is actually a religious invocation: Haree means hail, while Ambe is a Hindu Goddess (ahem, a mere 2 years ago, when in high school, we used to call parties harees, as in ‘we are off to haree at carni’. Little did we suspect that we were deep in the Gujarati). It came into usage in Kenya courtesy of the Indian coolies who built the Kenya-Uganda railway and would chant the phrase as they toiled under the gaze of man-eating lions. Some of the symbols that have come under suspicion for promoting devilry and general evil include ‘a compass and square on the grilles at the entrance to St. Andrews Church, Masonic coffins on the church’s 30 windows and celestial globes on stairs leading to the main sanctuary.’ (See more here) Other symbols on the chopping board are the old church’s spiral which is a spear on top of a hut.

Rev. Githii’s faction has been opposed by one made up of some of the more prominent business leaders in the congregation who according to the press contend that ‘the targeted symbols and designs have been in the PCEA churches for more than a century and were simple Scottish internal decor engravings and patterns on stained glass windows with links to Freemasonry but not necessarily satanic.’ This faction, perhaps unknowingly, is clutching to the legacy of the Overseas Presbytery of the Church of Scotland which for almost half a century (until 1956) run the affairs of the church and only relinquished direct control in 1975 when the first African senior minister was installed. The glass stained windows that are the subject of Rev. Githii’s righteous wrath are a tangible connection to the colonial ‘history’ of the church. The faction that supports their maintenance shall eventually lose because it is unknowingly in the path of a historical tsunami.

In the past, I have argued on this blog that African Christianity is approaching an epochal break with its European roots. The separation of the moral domain of the Kenyan and of the European is the fundamental moment in decolonisation. It should not be a surprise that it is taking place within the church; an institution built on the possibility of transcendence much more so than any secular decolonisation idea. You are more than the sum of your parts in the church. In a moment you can be made whole: transformed from sinner to believer, from sickness to health and witness the dead brought to life. Whether this is true or not matters less than the extent to which it is believed.

During the brief encounter between the peoples in Kenya with European colonialism, there were periodic attempts to spurn the ‘white man’s ways’. Whether it is the Mau Mau or Lukas Pkech, a young Pokot man who was a follower of Elija Masinde’s Dini of Msambwa and launched an armed rebellion against the British, religious belief has been ground zero in taking on the European yoke which crucially has been based far more on notions of moral superiority than on the Maxim gun.

The Rev. Githii’s of the world are going much further than Pkech who said ‘don’t listen to this man, he is our enemy. Haven’t we a god? We pray to you Jehovah. Who is Jesus? The wazungu say he is god but how could he be if he died?’ (quoted in Bethwell Ogot’s amazing essay in Mau Mau and Nationhood) Today’s rebels are not merely dissenting against colonialism, which is history anyway, they are remaking a moral house from the foundation up. This necessitates that they strive against the latest notion of European moral superiority: secular humanism. And they are taking this fight to the heart of the enemy. In May, while in the United States, Reverend Githii severed his denomination’s relationship with the National Capitol Presbytery and the Presbytery of Detroit over their ordaining of practicing homosexuals. He spurned the $300,000 in funding that his church receives from the PCUSA writing, ‘we find it unfortunate for you to question the inspiration of the Bible as the Word of God. This contradicts the message that the Western missionaries gave to us when our people first heard the gospel from them.’ In 2003, his counterpart in the Anglican Church, Bishop Simon Oketch, was almost beaten up by two Church of England colleagues on a London street. He had infuriated them over his uncompromising opposition to the appointment of the gay American pastor, Rev. Gene Kelly, as Bishop of New Hampshire. The Nigerian Anglicans, the largest congregation in that church followed suit by breaking longstanding links with the mother church in a rejection of its prerogative over them. Homosexuality is only the lightening rod. All manner of progressive civil freedoms will come under attack, most focusing on gender roles and sexuality.

There is irony in this. The western church has allowed the mores of secular society not because of reaching an enlightened understanding but by trying to stay relevant to a largely apathetic western public. Only in those areas where it retains a conservative ‘reactionary’ character has it thrived. The African church, rather than rebelling, seems to be saying, ‘you the progressives are the ones who are rebels who must be cast out of the house of God.’ This is a message that is gaining resonance in Africa where the church is growing faster than almost any other part of the world outside Mongolia. The explosions of sectarian violence worldwide leaving people in need of belonging and security; the march of democracy, which will reduce the power of the authorities to call the tune; and the proliferation of the means of communication will all combine to shrink the secular space and enlarge that of the believer. The nation, throughout all the countries in Christendom, has been erected on the foundations of the church. It will be no different in Kenya.

That Rev. Githii is willing to take aim at a national symbol such as harambee is proof that his campaign shall not be limited to dissing the western church. Rather than participate in direct politics, the Kenyan church shall eventually absorb politics into the moral space that it is busy carving. Its strictures on the private will be so much stronger than the ideas that maintain the public sphere, creating an immense pressure – and possibly even violence aimed at unbelievers or the immoral etc. What now only seems to be a campaign for souls will eventually colonise increasingly larger parts of the public sphere. The fact that the ‘centre’ – the collection of individuals and institutions that define national power – is so ideologically feeble and so dependent on western aid and political ideas will only hasten this process. Like Archbishop Rowan Williams who could only look on in helplessness and surrender as the Nigerians and Kenyans threatened to tear the Anglican Church to pieces over the issue of homosexuality, the Kenyan ruling classes will come to mime the moral positions advocated by the most popular of the churches. I say enjoy your beers and mini skirts for the moment because they may not be with you in similar form for very long. Already, sectors of the government are taking a harsher line on drinking and other ’sin’ products all in the name of public safety and health. But it will soon become noticeable that as bars begin to close ever earlier, churches will stay open later.

In time, this trend will probably make for an intolerant and constricted social space, but one that will for the first time create the basis of a politics connected to the moral lives of a majority. Through fire and brimstone, laws and regulations that reduce all manner of secular freedoms – that I for one enjoy – a nation shall begin to take shape. Or at least that is what I hope.

Okri, Naipaul and Arundhati bushwhacked by Moscow-based reviewer

I have spent the last day trawling through my favorite new e-zine, the eXile, which is published in Moscow. Its book reviewer, John Dolan, is particularly adept at delivering kidney-punch reviews of the great and good.

This is Dolan on Aidan Hartley’s The Zanzibar Chest.
‘The first thing you notice about Aidan Hartley’s memoir, The Zanzibar Chest, is the skill with which Hartley moves from stories of his ancestors’ colonial exploits to episodes in his own pinball trajectory through contemporary African war zones. It’s not easy to switch centuries and keep the reader with you, and Hartley does it well.

The second thing you notice is that Hartley barely bothers to disguise his Tory nostalgia for Britain’s Imperial past. It irks him that he can only observe and describe Africa’s many wars, when his fathers for generations past played such an enthusiastic role in starting, stoking and stifling the conflicts of their eras.’ more here.

Dolan then sets his sights on Ben Okri, a writer so confusing that everyone I have ever met who has read him vows he is deep and heavy and will not be drawn on further discussion. I suspect that like me, most of them have not read Okri after having tried to and concluded that you need to be on mescaline to get past the first chapter. Dolan, displaying a refreshing rage and bitterness for God knows what heaping of disappointments, does not shrink from letting Okri have it from both barrels.

Then, in a bid to be generous for once, Dolan takes on Naipaul who he understands better than almost anyone with whom I have discussed the bullied, snotty, little Trini who made good by hating everyone. Let me just say that like Dolan, I really dig Naipaul even while I see just how screwed up he is.

Says Dolan, ‘he hated the black boys, big and muscular, who beat him up, who scared him. It’s the truth; let’s face it. He has been called a racist, and he is one…’

‘They, the new black rulers, didn’t want any little Indians hanging around the Presidential Palace. Naipaul — who must truly have been a nasty boy, a sneaking eavesdropper and swot, understood one thing well: though eddies of decency and culture were developing in the West Indies, none of them were in the market for a little Hindu boy possessed by a great, corrosive intellect.’

‘Other Windies could try for the patronage of the Left, which had begun to cultivate “voices of color” — but they meant righteous, Ciceronian outrage from black, not Brahmin-beige, people. And when they said “new voices,” they were not talking about a snotty brown boy’s mocking, BBC-copying voice.’

Read the entire vicious-while-being-complimentary review here.

Our merry literary assassin, writing with the freedom of a man who seems to feels he has nothing to lose, which in my experience always makes for the most interesting outbursts, turns his tender attentions to Arundhati Roy. Arundhati, she of the breathless denunciations of American imperialism and capitalism, the patron saint of latte loving, anti-globalisers everywhere. More here.

The courtiers who use isms like machetes and will grind you to dust.

The courtiers who use isms like machetes

In every city, every town and hamlet, there is a small core of men and women who are drawn to the business of proselytizing to their fellows on how best to think or act. They have sought to join courts with no regard to whether they are monarchical, fascist, authoritarian or democratic. What they desire is the pose that is power, to beat their counterparts competition to the throne. I came to these abstract thoughts recently when I was listening to friends of mine praise the efficacy of free markets and the governmental policies needed to maintain this state of affairs. We spoke of informing, educating and cajoling ordinary people to appreciate ‘how markets work’. We raged (with me contributing a lion’s share) at the ignorance and lack of curiosity among people while generously pledging to help find ‘solutions’. Those of an opposite persuasion, among whom I also count not a few friends, speak of the inefficacy of markets and they too seek to inform and empower by educating and advocating for their point of view. The objects of their responsible attentions mill about, ignorant, disempowered, simple minded, blind to real interests according to their saviours. Yet those billions of people know markets intuitively and intimately. They have been buying, selling, exchanging, possessing and being dispossessed every moment of their lives so that their knowledge resides as much in the instinct and unconscious as it does in their diplomas. To them, the market is not the system their self-appointed betters announce they can view from the eagle’s viewpoint. Rather, it is the millions of transactions they conduct: decisions to act driven by past lessons of painful or pleasurable consequences and sometimes by rights and wrongs that are wholly moral.

The courtiers do not allow their ignorance to stand in the way of their fierce competition among themselves to win the right to be the main proselytizer to the people. Ideas are merely weapons in the race to the throne. This is not to say that they are all equally good or bad, or that they are necessarily harmful to the ordinary person. It is to recognise that those who wield them do it more in the fashion of a machete with which they wish to dismember court rivals. It matters not the historical period or the system of government, the court is where the ideas ‘of the (self) anointed’ are deployed. Our broadest and most opposed political categories after all were born when the deputies of the French National Constituent Assembly ranged themselves to the left and right of Louis XVI during that country’s revolution. Absurdity is always present in court: I am told, for instance, that the arrangement of the ‘conservatives’ to the right of Louis or the Speaker and the ‘radicals’ to the left originated from an old custom of a host seating an honoured guests to his right at formal gatherings. Right versus left, fascist versus communist, social democrat versus libertarian, whatever their roots, are mighty war-clubs called isms used by one group of courtiers against another. The rest, meanwhile, sleep, eat, have sex and die, each individual deeply woven into his own material and emotional markets, some which are regulated by some commandment and others in an unregulated flux of pain or pleasure. Each life is a million contradictions, multiple defeats and victories. There is little that is linear in it, even if its owner tries mightily to think it so. Its layers are multiple, their interaction with time not to mention other lives making for such complexity that it is b