Stickiness

How do masculinity and ethnicity attach themselves to specific objects, bodies, historical situations, and affects? Or, rather, because I’m less interested in the “how,” in what ways might considering the sticky natures of masculinity and ethnicity offer a glimpse into the present?

I use stickiness in a deliberately vague way to suggest that ethnicity and masculinity are less about bounded, definite identities, and more about accruing objects and affiliations, attachments and identifications that come, in turn, to function as prosthetics, as potential sites of woundedness and for wounding. This is, of course, not the only way prosthetics function, and toward the end of this entry, I want to consider benign, pleasurable, and beneficial ways to conceive of prosthesis within the contexts of ethnicity and masculinity.

The language of prosthesis provides at least one way of thinking about the panga-wielding, gun-toting, and branch-waving images and ideas that have been circulating in the past few weeks. These objects, frozen within photographic frames, extend bodies in new directions, give them new meanings, change the nature of objects (the agricultural panga into the death-wielding panga), allow bodies to realize new potentials. At the same time, such images pull us back into history to consider the various prostheses we associate with national masculinity (Kenyatta’s flywhisk, Moi’s rungu, the GSU’s vigorously applied clubs).

We are a nation attached to our prostheses.

To speak of prostheses is also to invoke the specter of phantom limbs: masculinities denuded of meaning during colonialism and increasingly after independence. Ethnicity stripped of its meaning by the mechanisms designed to produce compliant citizens and docile bodies. Increasingly, I believe we have to understand the masculinization of ethnicity, the production of male bodies as especially vulnerable to the deracinating effects of modernity.

It seems that, at a certain point, let’s call it the 1920s and 30s, though it can be extended backwards and forwards, Kenyan women and men diverged in their abilities and willingness to make sense of and inhabit modernity. Whereas women found ways to form new social attachments and build new social worlds, men adopted a wounded relationship to the past, most especially to a past where black, ethnic masculinity had a clear meaning and aim. Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya is the key text of this movement. (To be sure, the trade union activities of Harry Thuku and others seemed to offer an innovative mode of sociality, but it is not one that survived in any sustained way.)

Facing Mount Kenya represents one dominant affective and ideological relationship we have, as a nation, adopted to the past. The past is a site of wounding, of loss, yet, paradoxically, a place that, were we to visit, would allow us to recover unsullied, untarnished, whole forms of masculinity and ethnicity, indeed, masculinities available through ethnicities. Now, here it must be emphasized that the conditions under which we live today continually produce denuded, uncertain, forms of masculinity, tied to the contingencies of labor and economics, state intervention, and encroaching global norms. We might consider, for instance, the amazing popularity of kung-fu films and what seems to be a national attachment to certain very male heroes: James Bond, Rambo, the Terminator. As these figures become sites of identification, they simultaneously become impossible yardsticks: fully agential, they reveal our own sense of limited and constrained agency.

I return to the image of the Nairobi-bred and born young man who, at the appropriate age “returns” (and this word is crucial) to the countryside to undergo a masculinizing ritual in the “correct” way. There is a desire, here, to arrest time, to halt the masculinity-disrupting effects of the modern city, to reclaim a mode of authentic “masculinity. Yet, the impossibility of this return is precisely what generates the need for a prosthetic, creates a condition of prostheses, where meaning is supplemented, rituals created, history arrested, form re-captured.

I do not mean to imply that all forms of prosthetic creation are negative. Indeed, we cannot do without these aids to living and meaning-making.

Still, it might be worth thinking about the sticky quality of certain prostheses: their ability to accrue objects and aims that are always potential sites of attrition and wounding. In watching the success of certain forms of masculinity, one develops notions of what successful masculinity should be. Ideas stick. Yet, this stickiness is much like that of a suppurating wound. Painful to the touch.

Ethnicity, for instance, becomes linked to an ever-expansive but still ill-defined notion of culture. Each encounter with a “genuine” culture, be it via a documentary or through fashion, produces anxiety. We need only consider, for example, the strained, ongoing problem of a Kenyan national dress. On some level, it reflects a profound anxiety about our national identity, one provoked by what we have seen and recognized in other countries. Here, the sticky idea that national pride has something to do with dress.

Ethnicity acquires meaning as it comes into contact with other forms of belonging, absorbs ideas from them, attempts to replicate their structures. Again, here, we might consider Kenyatta’s decision to write about the structure of traditional life in the idiom of English political and social structures. It has a prosthetic aspect to it, a place of grafting and re-framing.

To understand the sticky, prosthetic quality of ethnicized masculinity:masculinized ethnicity means going beyond a glance toward the past (“traditional enemies”) and even a move beyond the politico-economic explanations (under x ruler, y people “ate”). It means considering, instead, the various local and global, real and imaginative, sticky attachments through which ethnicity and masculinity have come to be defined. It requires that we trace, in excruciating detail, how Stetson hats (a major prosthetic) come to be attached to specific modes of masculinity; how the magazine pages that adorn a young man’s room may shape his sense of self; how participation in sports has added to what particular modes of masculinity might mean.

Now, there are ways that sticky attachments help to create modes of pleasurable affiliation, moments when, through sports, for instance, we come to re-define how we belong to each other. Kenyans abroad know that flush of pleasure that comes from seeing a Kenyan flag waving in a random window. We can certainly accrue ways of extending into the world that enrich us. I think, for instance, of our shared foods—the distinctive Kenyan cuisine that brings such joy and pleasure. And such moments of stickiness need to be cultivated.

Of course, and here’s the rub, what might be termed stickiness’s adhesive quality is notoriously fickle. One picks up the good and bad alike; one has to learn to cultivate the appropriate filters, to ensure the bad does not overwhelm the good.

At a time when negative affect seems to be spreading, much like a bad disease, when rumors and news fuel desires for and acts of revenge, at a time when it seems impossible to reflect, as we are called to action, to write, to mourn, to provide succor, to flee, to hope, to dream, to act, at such a time, it seems especially irresponsible to attempt a certain kind of writing, a certain kind of thinking, to abstract away from the responsibilities of the now. Yet, I would insist, at such a time, we cannot discount the (ir)rational acts of theorizing, of speculation, of thinking otherwise. It is to this end that I continue to try to think otherwise, to address the urgencies of now in another register, one that may be just as crucial, if less palatable.

I have tried, here, to think about the particular ways ethnicity and masculinity accrue objects and meanings in seemingly irrational ways, but with potentially devastating consequences, to translate the image of panga-wielding men into an object of analysis, as a symptom of the place where ethnicity meets masculinity in the vexed sticky region of the present.

Chickens and Hoes (While Waiting for the Plane)

One persistent error of most political analysis is that it looks toward structures of established power to create (ir)rational narratives of the present, histories of why we are where we are. I say error, not because such a strategy is always wrong, but because I often think it is too wedded to disciplinary conventions and knowable formations (government, state, political parties) to get to what might be irrational and idiosyncratic about political acts and political actors. Contrary to our fondest hopes and dreams, political decisions, or decisions with political consequences, are not always hatched while we remain clutched in rationality’s bossom.

I begin this way to critique what I see as a constant failing in our political discourse: the emphasis on “leaders” providing the solution. Somehow, if we see Kibaki and Raila shaking hands or hugging, the negative affect which, in many cases, predates them, will dissolve. Their staged bonhomie will radiate like a warming sun and melt our cold smiles, frigid hearts, and arctic pangas. To be clear, I do not claim that their symbolic acts of reconciliation may not have an effect, but I do not hinge our future on it.

While waiting for plane of national reconciliation to arrive, we might turn our attention, instead, to the local ways in which rage and anger accrete and spread.

Was there a moment when John’s son accidentally hit Simon’s rooster with a stone, inadvertently ending its life? Was there a time when Mary’s children “stole” fruits from Zipporah’s garden, as children are wont to do? How have such acts, in the current climate, been transformed from childish antics to vicious identities: John’s people are killers. Mary’s people are thieves.

If these examples seem silly, it might be worth our while to dwell on the complex way in which silly narratives are now being re-written: accidents transformed into malicious acts, petty insults re-framed as murderous threats. My father can beat yours has become a terrible script, not a childhood chant. Incidents where a borrowed hoe was returned late are now being re-written as long-term plans for genocide.

There is a terrible (il)logic to these re-writings, re-framings, and re-scriptings. But it is not a logic anchored solely in our national leaders. To focus on them would be like spraying water, desperately, at the point where a fire started, and ignoring the places to which the fire has spread, finding new fuel, cleaner air, opportunities to flame out.

And so, much as I refrain from offering solutions, I have to say, our solutions need to be multi-local, focused on small community leaders, individuals who have sway, the self-appointed leaders of youth groups, the young men and women who have leadership abilities. Our conversations need to be about killed chickens and stolen fruit, borrowed hoes and undelivered fertilizer. They need to deal with small, petty resentments and festering injuries: who was assigned to sing a solo in church, who bought the prize ram on sale, whose cow produces the most milk.

To use a term I will continue to use: we need to arrest the transformation of amusing anecdotes into evidence of malice. We need to arrest the changing of our pleasurable memories into occasions for injury. We need to arrest the unruly way in which our pasts are becoming occasions for retaliation, not gentle humor.

We need to stop waiting for the plane and focus on our chickens and hoes.

stuckness

I tend not to like the question “what went wrong?” It sends out a tendril of hope to the past with the expectation that said tendril will return as a fully-formed plan(t), a manifesto for the future. It also assumes, as several recent reports claim, that the “wrong” I occupy is the same “wrong” you occupy, or even that we both occupy “wrongs,” ignoring the possibility that some might be reveling in a “right” or be irritated by the “merely inconvenient.”

I am not interested, here, in mapping out gradations of how different citizens are experiencing the crisis, some as ghosts others, like myself, as virtual bodies. Nor am I interested in registering hurt, pain, loss, disappointment, or disillusionment. Others have done so far more effectively.

I am interesting in considering the complex question of what it means to be an agential citizenry. And I am interested in registering a sense of what, following Lauren Berlant, might be termed “stuckness.”

I will confess that “stuckness” describes, first and foremost, my inability to write and, perhaps worse, the absence of any desire to do so. But, for now, I will attempt to defer the psychic negotiations of the present.

Thanks to Mutumia (one of my favorite bad influences) I can’t get rid of the image of a Datsun stuck in the mud. I will confess that this is one of my “nostalgic” images of Kenya: a country where the drivers get stuck in the mud while pedestrians gawk, walk on by, or deign to help.

I have been thinking of “stuckness” as I read bloggers get entrenched in their positions—I make no distinctions here between political positions; as I read essays and blog posts from different constituencies that seem to repeat the same facts, use the same syntax, even have the same tone. This is not a simple matter of plagiarism, but a symptom of “stuckness.”

It is a particular stuckness in which, seemingly, there are no helpful pedestrians around, only people wanting to climb out of the mud and into the Datsun (let’s “move on,” “get beyond,” “go back to normal”). And the wheels spin frantically. We are all pretty sure that the driver, whose face, for some reason, remains hidden, “bought” his license. Still we pile on, hoping that the Datsun will fulfill its national promise. Kenya is my country, Datsun is my car.

To register stuckness through the metaphor of the Datsun, is also to say that the roads were never constructed, the river never dammed, and erosion never halted. We might also say the fields have not been fertilized, the farmers have not been paid, and the harvest rots in the granaries. More patient minds than mine can parse this.

I detect “stuckness” in frantic, even manic, turns toward this negotiator and that; in the continuation of hate speech via blogs and text messages; in our invocations of pasts that have never been, or have been occupied unevenly. Perhaps under VOK we were once one, but that supposed unity fractured a long time ago.

I think what is interesting, and simultaneously disabling, is how stuckness responds to revelation (assuming conditions respond). One would hope—I certainly do in my increasingly few utopic moments—that revelations about the past and the present, about electoral procedure and possible misconduct, would enable us to take different positions, would, somehow, cause a shift that might enable the Datsun to start moving (I will admit here, I take the car metaphor from Binyavanga, who uses it far more eloquently and to better purpose than I can muster). Yet, somehow, the shame-laced bravado of our strutting male leaders (we cannot and must not forget about the stakes of masculinity in all this) makes such re-thinking impossible.

To continue with the metaphor: each new revelation seems to be yet another weight added to the Datsun, another deepening of entrenchment, and the wheels spin frantically.

There is also another kind of stuckness in terms of what I have termed an agential citizenry. In a long-ago post (too lazy to search and link), I had mentioned that my legacy from the Moi years was a profound impotence, an inability to feel that I had or would ever have a voice or opinion that mattered. We are, I think, still laboring under this legacy, to the extent that we tie our political futures and identities to certain leaders who, quite often, do not have our best interests at heart. Justice has no other proper name. Neither does equality. But somehow, one could say because of a long process of acculturation, we seem to believe, too much, in the power of synonyms and less so in our own (impoverished) agency.

Put another way, we seem to believe that we can exercise our agency only through specific “anointed” leaders, leaders for whom we are willing to fracture the relationships we have spent lifetimes cultivating. Instead of looking to them to “save us” or give our choices validity, we might question our reliance on them as the only proxies for our desires. This, it seems to me, is one of the most tragic manifestations of our stuckness.

On Sodomy

Even though I *should* know better (is this not the lament of now?), I have been reluctant to write about gender and sexuality, convinced that “the national” takes precedence. How does that happen? How do we convince ourselves that our most urgent questions should take a back seat while we wrestle with the “immediate” politics of the present? And, why is it that, quite often, it’s questions of gender and sexuality that are shunted to the side, as though they are not part of the national?

It is no secret that at moments of crises, nations are sutured (though not healed) by appeals to kinship values. The repeated incantation “we are all brothers and sisters” is chanted in what one of my languages calls uchawi (another language calls it the performative). We are encouraged to subordinate idiosyncratic passions to maintain the kinship-nation. Any acts or utterances that step outside prescribed lines are taken to demonstrate indifference toward the national cause. (I will confess, all this setting up is a delaying tactic.)

One of the most disturbing reports on the post-election violence claims that boys have been sodomized. It is often juxtaposed with the statement that women have been raped. Sodomy and rape can then be understood as similar acts of gendered violence. Simultaneously, sodomy, like rape, can be understood as an engendering act that both creates and reinforces gendered hierarchies: boys are lesser men, available for bodily humiliation.

Still treading warily: gender-based violence is violence no matter what form it takes. In no way should this reflection be read as an apologia for male rape.

What strikes me in thinking about this issue is how seldom the Kenyan press (mainstream and bloggers) and artists (musicians and writers) tackle the question of male homosexuality, of sodomy (and here, I must confess to a certain weariness with “good gay” people who “don’t do that”). I am especially concerned by the dearth of affirmative (“sodomy is good”) or neutral (“sodomy is okay”) reports, counter-narratives that would compete with and contextualize the current rapes.

Put otherwise: if the only accounts of sodomy we have come from prison and ethnic-based rapes, it becomes impossible to understand sodomy (a metonym for homosexuality) as benign, benevolent, pleasing, and pleasurable. It becomes impossible to campaign for homosexual rights when the acts associated with homosexuals are symbols of ethnic violence and national fragmentation.

Instead, as in the current situation, sodomy can only be understood within certain conceptual clusters. It is pedophilic, something men perform on boys. It depends on gendered notions of submission and violation. It violates the sanctity of the family—here, we cannot overlook the symbolic way incest is conjured. It breaks the contracts that bind communities.

Cumulatively, these narratives, whether spelled out or not, create a position for sodomy outside the national imagination. It defiles and violates the national.

To be clear, I am not conflating the rapes of boys and sodomy. Rather, I am interested in how such a conflation might happen (might be happening), and how sodomy might then come to occupy a degraded place in the national imagination. In those metonymic flights beloved by contemporary cultural politics, one who is for sodomy (as I am) might then be taken to sanction pedophilia, ethnic violence, and national fragmentation.

I would like to arrest this metonymic flight.

Ushahidi.Com

I’m told Ushahidi means witness in Swahili. Those who have followed my mishaps know my facility with Swa (ndoto=moon).

Ushahidi is a brilliant tool that asks us to bear witness to what’s happening in our country, to keep tallies, to keep records, to refuse to have our histories scrubbed clean. If you are in Kenya, traveling in Kenya, or have friends and family letting you know what’s happening, please bear witness.

Report Acts Of Violence In Kenya

And, I would also like to thank the kbw administrators, who have created and enabled one of the most necessary spaces for us right now. I cannot express my gratitude enough for the alliances and affiliations you have facilitated.

We, the Innocent

I would like us to be a little more self-conscious about the kinds of narratives we are currently producing and the positions we assume as writers, bloggers, and historians. Increasingly, I am uncomfortable with the valorization of a certain kind of citizen: the good citizen is diasporic, multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan, middle- to upper-class.

The good citizen has a rainbow of friends and intimates, control over his or her emotions, and access to sophisticated analytic tools. The good citizen, unlike the bad one, understands the incredible value of human life, the need for a strong economy, the urgency of maintaining Kenya’s international reputation.

Above all else, the good citizen has vision and perspective, understands the stakes of the present, their historical grounding, their future import. I am, of course, one such good citizen myself.

What troubles me about being a good citizen is how I then flatten the lives and experiences of bad citizens. They are “narrowly” ethnic, lack economic vision, put their own selfish needs above the nations, have no regard for our international reputation, do not understand the structural logics of business or politics.

To be clear, the designation bad citizen conflates our wealthy, educated leaders, and the rioting subaltern youth.

Admittedly, I have overly-simplified what are incredibly complex gradations of moral and ethical responsibility. But sometimes it’s “good” to be vulgar in the hopes of gain.

I am more interested in tracing the complex networks of filiation and affiliation that complicate simple divisions of good and bad; I want to note the forms of class and ideological violence that might inhere in the position of “good citizen” and the generative, even positive lessons we might take from “bad citizens.”

I would like to avoid, if possible, the hubris that marks a certain kind of moral position by claiming: “no matter the provocation, I would never do that!” Though I am not religious, I would prefer to begin from the more uncomfortable, more humbling position of “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”

In the Kenya I remember (a lot changes in 11 years), there are no “high roads,” those in cars bounce along dusty roads with the same kind of comfort as those riding on donkeys. And, in the rainy season, the hyperbolic comment, “it would be faster to walk,” rings true.

I invoke mud here, not to create another opposition between the clean and the unclean, but to suggest a certain spirit of togetherness, in which we all walk through, drive through, struggle through, and laugh through the mud.

I have, it is true, no solutions, no demands, no predicates about the current situation. In the last few days, my writing is impressionistic rather than rational, scattered and fragmented rather than polished and coherent, idiosyncratic, especially when compared to the rich and productive analyses produced elsewhere.

In response to the question that continues to be asked, “how did we get here?” I have struggled with my own complicity, my own culpability. Has my writing in Gikuyu over the past few years been deeply ethnocentric? Have my constant attempts to bring ethnicity into a productive relationship with nationalism and cosmopolitanism been nothing more than an alibi for an ethnic plot? (Of course, that might be crediting my one reader with too much power; but one never knows.)

I think we need to be asking such questions: asking not just about how our political leaders “went wrong,” but about the people we have been and continue to be. Asking about text messages we have received and sent; asking what kind of people our friends and acquaintances take us to be that they would send such messages to us.

We have reached a point where the number of wakes we can hold exceed the days of the year. Our dead have turned into bodies. They should keep us awake, alert, searching.

Maybe then.

Perhaps only then.

Fine. Just Fine.

My brother frustrates me.

In response to my nagging, frantic, persistent questions, he responds with “fine, just fine.” I feel as though he’s holding back. I want him to tell me how he “really feels.” I want him to translate feelings into language. To become eloquent about “his situation.” I want to believe—as smiling TV talk show hosts have taught me— that anything and everything can and should be said.

But we are not seated on a couch in front of a studio audience. And the scene of trauma is more inchoate than my desires will admit.

Amidst the production of eloquently written narratives about the now, the incessant and necessary historical production of how we came to be here, I want to reserve a space for what eludes us. I want to set a place at the table for the specter who may never show up and who may never leave. I want the awkwardness of an empty seat at a dinner party, the full plate of uneaten food, dutifully served.

I wonder if my desire to feel uncomfortable is a form of diasporic guilt. My brother wants the world to be “fine,” believes if he says it is it will be, perhaps in a throwback to the witchdoctors said to be in our family line. I want to probe the scab, to memorize its edges, to take impressions, create a sculpture: Scab of Trauma.

I am trained, after all, to use language as a way to probe gaps and silences, listen for the unheard and the lost.

Dare I confess I have been unable to write?

Even as I press for narratives and read others’ narratives, even as I react with rage, amusement, and irritation at international stories that “get it wrong or right,” even as I want to mark my distance from the madness, my engagement with the madness, my participation in the madness, my desire for the madness, my madness in the madness. I have been unable to write.

Like my brother, I am unable to create a coherent narrative. Someone burnt the paper. Someone else stole the ink. And the desk has bloodstains on it.

I don’t remember the alphabet. I no longer remember language. I can only use sacred words in a profane way.

I have forgotten how to think. I doubt feelings exist in language. Everything is going to be all right.

Perhaps my brother has it right. Perhaps he has found the only way to continue. At least one way to survive.

Fine. Just fine.

. . .

The inevitable pleasure of watching a horror movie is that one always experiences relief: if a scene is too gory, cover your eyes, block your ears, leave the theater, turn off the DVD. You can always escape from fiction into reality. None of it is real. You are thrilled by the absurdity of what you choose to see or block out.

To say that the past week—has it really been that long?—is like a horror movie is to say too much and too little. Looking at pictures of burn victims, of burned and looted houses, of men, women, and children running to safety has been surreal. I have learned not to look too closely, to avoid determining whether I know the subjects of those photographs. I have tried to avoid the shock of recognition that would give flesh to abstract fears.

Although I have been scouring blogs for news, I have also tried to filter them out. I want to believe that my family and friends are on the side of right, that they are incapable of joining the orgy of hate and violence and premature celebration. My fear for them is coupled with an equally strong fear of them. Somewhere, in this mess, someone I know, someone I love, someone I respect, has raised a hand in anger and frustration.

It would be a mistake to view the events of the past week as entirely singular, extraordinary, or unexpected. Instead, they dramatize that for too long many Kenyans have been closing their eyes and blocking their ears to the ordinary suffering and frustration of fellow citizens. If what we have seen was an eruption, it was fed, in part, by our easy smiles and tolerance of inequality. Perhaps the sad truth is that we have all been living in a horror movie and we just awoke to that fact.

Unlike most horror movies, which end in total destruction or in some kind of redemption, the way ahead for us is not as scripted. It’s clear that we cannot simply assume we share the same values. Instead, we must cultivate shared values. We cannot rely on our leaders to heal our wounds. Instead, we must take responsibility for wounding each other. We can no longer live within purely ethnic enclaves. Instead, we must begin to bridge cultural and geographic differences.

However, the good news is that many of these foundations are in place. Despite what some alarmists might be claiming, we did not sweep away the past 45 years of our existence.

We share languages and foods. We live in the same neighborhoods, attend the same schools, and worship in the same Churches and temples and mosques. We laugh at the same comedians and dance to the same music. We celebrate when our runners win and are thrilled to hear Swahili in international films.

Above all, we have the power to stop the movie, change our roles, re-write the script.

Imagine how awesome that is: we can stop watching and acting in a crappy movie, take control of our roles, and create something wonderful.

I have been using the word wonderful a lot the last few days, not in blind denial, but to describe what I want, what I believe in, what I’m in the middle of building.

Join me.

For something more practical, see here.

Against “Normal”

I want peace but I don’t want a “return to normal.”

“Normal” would distinguish the extraordinary violence of the past few days from the quotidian violence of the past 5 years. Instead of seeing the recent acts of rape and sodomy as co-extensive with those of the past 5 years, normal would register them as anomalous.

A “return to normal” would ignore the economic privations of the past 5 years, relying on a failed trickle-down theory. It would refuse to register the class circumstances of many protesters. It would understand economic failure as personal and idiosyncratic, as opposed to structural and pervasive. It would, to overuse a term, normalize class inequalities as “the way it is.”

A “return to normal” would keep sotto-voce or unspoken conversations we need to have about ethnicity. We cannot ignore it nor should we try. We cannot “get over it” nor should we try. We can forge something powerful and wonderful, and, indeed, many of us have in our multi-ethnic schools, neighborhoods, intimate homes, churches, and organizations. We need to stop believing and acting as though the only way ethnicity can function is as a deeply divisive element.

A “return to normal” would believe that psychic fissures and wounds can exist as part of our everyday as long as they don’t erupt into acts of violence. It would be a mistake to see the events of the past few days as lacking any history, any context, any validity. And it would be an even graver mistake to view our now as the result of a few “bad” people, those who are “un-Kenyan.”

We might insist, rather, on refusing the false comfort of silence. We should, for those who pray, pray and dialogue. We might learn to be honest, to refuse the false comfort of civility in hopes of something better. We might refuse to accept accolades from strangers, when those do not serve our interests.

We might, rather than reveling in myths of our friendliness and hospitality and peacefulness, become painfully, acutely, necessarily self-reflective about who we are and who we want to be.

Despite his tarnished reputation, Kenyatta used to say Uhuru na Kazi. In the last few years, I have taken to thinking Uhuru ni Kazi, not to conflate both in good neo-liberal fashion, but to think of the ongoing work of freedom and liberty.

And, finally, because I take my wisdom from literature, I end with the cryptic Amos Tutuola, from Palm-Wine Drinkard: “To go back was harder and to go further was hardest, so at last we made up our mind and started to go forward” (64).

News from Home

30 hours after I send a frantic SMS: “Are you ok?” Finally, a phone call.

The line is unclear, my family sound as though they are underwater. Suddenly, the idea of being “drowned” in violence sounds more than metaphorical.

My mother asks, “Do you remember 1982?” It’s one of the few sentences I can understand. I want to tell her no. Or, that I was too young to understand. But memories consist of more than facts. I remember 1982 as dark and uncertain—as a threat that hangs over all my political imaginings. To be national, I learned, was to live without certainty. 1982 always infantilizes me.

I answer, “a little bit.”

But, there is something different to this call. Once, in the midst of other clashes, when I was still away, I wondered if she’d leave the country, move somewhere safer. Stubbornly, she replied that she could not leave a country for which her father had fought and been imprisoned.

Now, she tells me she is considering leaving, will know more in a few days. More than anything, this scares me. It terrifies me, a lot.

* * *
Over the past few years, I have claimed that the most hurtful legacy of the Moi era was that it left us feeling impotent. We were infantilized—even fed milk to emphasize the point, subject to the whims of the man with a rungu. And how efficiently it was used.

M has provided a brief summary, with more to come, of “what went wrong” in the post-2002 election. He has combined a nice balance of failures of leadership and broken promises—what we might call top-level stuff—with the sentiments of citizens, feelings of betrayal, the increasing problem of perception (which he has mapped beautifully).

To my mind, Kibaki’s tenure only helped to compound a problem with which we have struggled since independence. It was easier, I think, in those early days of nationalist and independence fervor to believe we knew the content of being national, what bound us together, what our goals were, how we were constituted, or being constituted as a nation. By the late 1960s, though, it was clear that what Ngugi wa Thiong’o identifies as neo-colonialism had become entrenched. There was, to put it baldly, an ongoing class war.

One need not go through the vagaries of Moi’s tenure. But I have long suspected—and worried—that Kibaki’s achievements, such as they have been (and a comment on one of the blogs echoes my sentiments) have tended to benefit those with money. Now, I do not simply mean the super-rich, but also the emerging middle and upper-middle classes. What has seemed absent—often described as his famed reticence—has been an idea of how to build a nation, how to promote feeling national.

I certainly do not believe that such sentiments are reducible to economic gain, though they are not completely divorced from it. In other words, I do not believe that promises of better economic growth necessarily result in the forms of convivial affiliation and mutual care that I associate with citizenship and feeling national. These more ephemeral, but nonetheless crucial elements of who we are, who we can be, how we are also need to be cultivated.

More to the point, we need to take seriously the economic aspects of looting, burning, and killing based, in part, on the terribly flawed premise that ethnic affiliation equals sharing in the “national cake.” Instead of shattering this myth, Kibaki, with parliament behind him, enhanced it, parliament through their multiple pay increases.

In the past, I have suggested that I do not know what it means to “feel national.” It may have been taken as a purely idiosyncratic statement. Today, I would emphasize its structural and historical dimensions: the country to which I belong has done bad job of creating the conditions under which, the expressions through which, and the mechanisms by which I understand the positive content of “feeling national.”

And here I must underline positive content: that our elections for the past three cycles have been based on getting rid of people as opposed to building something strikes me as a symptom of a denuded approach to being national. To my mind, becoming national depends more so on positive content, what we want to accomplish, the dreams and goals and aspirations we share than on the dross we seek to reject.

* * *
In the garbled noise of today’s call, I heard my niece say that she is 6. My 1982 happened when I was 6. I hope this is not hers.