10.01.08

Over the past ten years, my home church (close to home; I no longer attend; were I to enter I might burst into flames—yes, it’s a bad pun) has produced a crop of Unwed Mothers (UM), Pregnant We Wed couples (PWW), and Ecstatic Grandmothers (EG).

We have been happily fornicating.

(This explains why my own sexploits elicit yawns. Been there, done that, though maybe not in that position.)

We belong to the generation that embraced all night prayers at select city churches. One hears of other embraces that took place. And clearly other kinds of embraces were and are still taking place.

We are a lusty people.

I offer this not as evidence of hypocrisy—accusations of hypocrisy accomplish nothing—and more as a way to think about Kenyan sexuality as diverse and healthy and pulsating. I offer this to oppose (in debate speak) the silly idea that Kenyans are conservative, a claim used to justify gender oppression and to promote gender normativity.
* * *
In part, I might be mapping here the distinction between the painful earnestness of my youth church—where vice was a word in the King James with some relation to Moi, Kibaki, and Saitoti—and the church of my adulthood, in which, like Jesus’s followers, we are UM, PWW, EG, and otherwise vice-ridden.

If we are to understand gender and sexuality in Kenya, we cannot get away from the church, and to understand the church as primarily oppressive seems short-sighted, for what is said in the pulpit often has little relation to how members of the church live and act.

This means that what might be termed “religious discourse” in Kenya, what is enabled by the institution of the church, the discourse communities that form in unexpected ways in and around the church in Kenya, we need to think about these in unusual ways.

We need to think about religious discourse as more than what is said from the pulpit, more than what is shared in moments of confession, more than what is “right,” more, simply more.
* * *
I like the idea of Kenyans as happy fornicators.

We negotiate religion in incredibly bodily ways, understanding it as a site of pleasure, as the domain of ecstasy. We understand that bodily pleasure is a gift. We understand, as many of the first African converts did, that to touch and be touched should never be cause for shame.

Despite over a century of Christian teaching, we are yet to learn how to be appropriately shame-filled. This makes me happy.
* * *
I am not an ethnographer. I have not the eye, the ear, or the mind to capture what is. And the Nairobi I describe—I have yet to leave the city—this Nairobi is suffused with my desires, laden with meanings I create and impose.

This act of creative reconstruction (to borrow a lovely phrase from George Hutchinson) lies at the heart of what it means to imagine and re-imagine one’s present, to inhabit now as one who shapes, who sees anew, who envisions possibilities.

To think of this diary in this particular way is to acknowledge the kind of public work, the sotto-voce ambitions it and I harbor. And it is to think of what it means to have semi-public writing.

It is also to re-think embedding and re-embedding as practices, ways of living, feeling, being, acting, being acted on, re-acting.

I have to keep reminding myself that one hyphenates re-turn.

09.30.08

Reginald Shepherd is dead.

This moment of ending is also a moment of return, and I am 20 again, roaming in bookstores and bookstores, between sheets and pages, looking for mirror-images in reflecting pools.

I am 20 and I already know that the people around me, my club friends, my online friends, the community I have cobbled together, that as wonderful as these might be, I can never have certain conversations with them, that I must agree sexuality counts more than race.

I am 20 and have fallen in love with Melvin Dixon and Essex Hemphill and Assotto Saint, and I am learning, daily, that these men, these love objects, can only exist as words on a page, as other people’s memories. I have picked up a book and it is dedicated to the many thousands gone.

It’s difficult to capture, now, as it always is, what then was like, learning how to be foreign in unfamiliar locations, to be familiar in unrecognizable ways, to inhabit a language of desire that warred, daily, with a well-trained religious instinct, to inhabit a body that, even then, felt awkward.

I am 20 and familiar with the clichés about being lonely in a crowd—but I hate crowds and I dance to forget there are others around me. I dance to forget that I don’t register in this space, but that it seems like the only possible one.

I am 20 and learning the affective difference between gay and queer, that gay spaces, which, in Pittsburgh, mean white, very white, gay spaces filled with college students, and they are so white, that these spaces don’t exist for me, and they are all I have, or all I can find.

I am 20 and it will be three years before I have the courage or foolishness to follow my desire.
* * *
At 20, I knew three names: Reginald Shepherd, G. Winston James, and Carl Phillips. I knew they were black and gay and wrote poetry and were alive.

I don’t remember how this trinity became one, the rationale through which these figures became metonymic, evidence there was life after the 1990s.

Of the three, Reginald Shepherd stands out the most clearly. We read Some are Drowning in a poetry workshop I took in Pittsburgh; I read and re-read and have taught his beautifully crafted essay “Coloring Outside the Lines,” a reflection on desire across lines, living across lines.

Grief, writes Essex Hemphill, “is a wig / that does not rest gently / on my head.”
* * *
I am 20 and want to write poetry, but it is fragmentary and inchoate, and refuses to be a well-wrought urn. I am reading essays that tell me black poets are angry and write about politics or black poets write narrative poems and that black poets always have messages and that black poets, there’s a list of things.

I am 20 and don’t find myself in these descriptions.

I am 20 and reading so-called innovative poetries and Reginald Shepherd hands me a lifeline, allows me to dare otherwise.
* * *
It’s difficult to write about those who allow us to write, those permission-givers, those who mentor us by example.

One writes to repay a debt.

I never met Reginald Shepherd, but have often slept with him on my pillow. I have asked my students to read him, have spent hours thinking about what he says and how he says it.

I am 20 and restless and confused and a little less lonely.

09.29.08

In 1978, The Nairobi Times Magazine published a special issue focused on Jomo Kenyatta’s death. Titled “The Last Farewell,” the issue begins from 1952, with Kenyatta as “Freedom Fighter,” displays various family portraits of Kenyatta with his extensive family, and features various portraits of his corpse.

There is much to be written about how this moment of collective grief forged a transient nation, as moments of grief do. Indeed, this special issue should be considered one of the founding documents of the new, post-Kenyatta Kenya. The Kenya I have always known.

Page 10 and 11 feature photographs of the funeral. The accompanying text, I reproduce in full:

FAREWELL TO MZEE JOMO KENYATTA
Thursday, August 31, 1978

President Kenyatta’s body is laid to rest in a special mausoleum, Parliament grounds . . . One of the eulogies is read by the President, Mr. Daniel Arap Moi . . . After the late President’s body is laid to rest, his widow, Mama Ngina receives his commander-in-chief’s cap, his Presidential Standard and the National Flag.

Page 12 features an excerpt from the ongoing comic The Phantom, by Lee Falk and Sy Barry. In this particular episode, this white masked character, the African-based batman, pursues a white monster called HZZ, who has just invaded and is about to destroy an African village.

Page 13 of this special issue features a comic of Hägar The Horrible by Dik Browne. The comic is hilarious. And I can’t reproduce it.

Page 14 features a crossword puzzle by S.D.B., and the first clue across is “Look scared of a European?” The answer consists of 4 words, with the word lengths, 5,2,3,4.

I’m not sure what phrase describes fear of Europeans.

To credit the magazine’s designers with intent goes against the Barthesian in me, but interesting possibilities emerge when we consider the narrative the entire magazine tells.

The abrupt switch in tone from Kenyatta’s funeral to the colonial fantasy pretensions of The Phantom suggests a narrative of regression. The death of Kenya’s first president, a nationalist upstart, speaks to a colonial fantasy that the new nation would regress following independence, that, as some whites prophesied, the new Kenya would abort if led by blacks.

The monstrousness of HZZ (and we really enter into the monstrousness of the acronymed in the late 70s and early 80s), which is to be pursued by a white masked crusader, a white man saving blacks from white monstrosity, that this fantasy subtends the scene of Kenyatta’s death, such an ideological (mis)reading might tell a useful story about then, about there.

While The Phantom tells a story of imperial nostalgia, Hägar continues a story of conquest, the Vikings humanized, made sympathetic. And Funny. Very Funny.

It’s difficult to explain how these tonal shifts function: that we turn from mourning to a neo-imperial fantasy to conquest humor. This is not simply the “amnesia” of which so many of us complain. Because we are being asked not simply to forget but to re-write, to re-imagine, to be nostalgic for white men saving us from white monsters. And to laugh about it.

But Hägar is not the end, for we must now turn to the crossword puzzle: “Look scared of a European?” 4 words.

At Kenyatta’s death, we are left with this clue.

09.28.08

My parents’ generation wanted us to be doctors, engineers, lawyers, architects. Social achievement came marked Professional Degree, University of X. The tarmacking generation invented its own language, de-linking scholastic achievement from social approbation.

In Nairobi, this transition is marked by the vulgar (common) euphemism: doing well. One “does well,” “is doing well,” or “is doing very well.” Each of these carries finely shaded meanings.

It is a language that is notably devoid of specifics while being laden with social direction and directives. It is a language of where one lives and shops, where one works and plays, who one knows and, sometimes more important, who knows one.

It is a world where one is constantly reminded that “Nairobi is very small,” the irony being that Nairobi’s “smallness” exists in the minds of those who construct it as such. It is a world where, as a still-to-be-published work by MMK reminds me, there is a distinction between Mwangis and The Mwangis, Otienos and The Otienos, where asking which Mwangis or which Otienos betrays one’s origins.

What is most fascinating about this class-demarcated society is how it replicates and combines the inherited smallness of the village with the class-created smallness of the city. If class tensions (this needs work) are responsible for one kind of violence, then the tensile strength of class helps one transcend other kinds of violence.

Those who do well choose to avoid troubling topics, deferring and displacing their own urgencies, and the country’s emergencies, onto those who do, but not well.

Class allegiances provide enough shared ground that one can avoid certain topics. We do well to avoid troubling conversations.

Yet, doing well is more than simply having money or spending money. Nor is it, as columnist Clay Muganda implies, being able to distinguish between Stacey Adams and Hush Puppies (seriously? Someone cares about this?).

Doing well and continuing to do well, these are forms of social production and reproduction, how class status and privilege (hearing about violence is a privilege) travel and replicate themselves.
* * *
Doing well troubles me because it is so often divorced from doing good. The fissure between doing well and doing good, or, better yet, the chasm between doing well and doing good is littered with the bodies of those who often try to jump across—there are no bridges.

In conversations with those who do well, those who are doing well, I’m startled by the “I made it” and “that’s their problem.” I am naïve, or choose to be naïve so I can be startled. It’s easier than being disappointed.

Of course, what remains disappointing is the idea that one needs to be doing well to do good, even though few of those who actually do well do good.

We do not need wealth to be kind to one another. We need not drive cars to offer each other lifts. But this move between the literal and symbolic is one more chasm we need to bridge.

To do good is to move beyond the circle of one’s attachments. It is to dare otherwise, to risk the foreign flavors of hunger and new spices, to stumble in another’s tongue, to lose one’s fluencies and pursue someone else’s expectations.
* * *
Yet to ask we who are already deeply unsettled, already deeply concerned about how to live from this now to the next, to ask us to abandon or risk our fluencies is already too much.

And in a country where the informal charity of kitu kidogo frames all our charitable endeavors—one gives what one can—to ask that we lose our hard-won fortunes, that we stretch our symbolic capital in new, unexpected, and risky ways, to ask this might be to ask too much.

How does one ask others to risk their attachments? How does one ask others to leap across chasms?

09.27.08

Everything feels new in Nairobi.

It’s difficult to decipher what is new and what is new to me. I am given directions that don’t compute, familiar landmarks re-named, destroyed, replaced. Place has shifted, space become foreign, and I rely on the kindness of strangers.

Daily I walk through someone else’s geography.

“Welcome home” requires translation. Karibu Kenya. Wii mucii. Umerudi.

A simple hypothesis: the newness of Nairobi is magnified by the uniformity of there, where a Target in every town, or a Walmart, a Starbucks or a Gap, a McDonalds or a Pizza Hut, these make landscapes familiar, distressingly and reassuringly so.
* * *
I turn to those old standards, the obituaries, which I learned to scour as a child, less because I knew the faces and more, I suspect, because I had seen my mother doing so and also to begin tracing webs of affiliations.

They do not disappoint.

Fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and distant relatives (of the USA, of England, of KIE, of Big Company) are named.

The language of neoliberalism has taken hold, and individuals are now “Promoted to Glory.” On hearing this, my sister tells me that promotion is the right word, because many of those promoted here do nothing.

I still continue to wonder why “promoted” why not “retired.” Though I guess one cannot be “retired to glory.”
* * *
I wonder whether I have the energy to write something about returning home in one’s 30s, as though age, not time away, makes the difference. In some strange way it does.

In my 20s, a trip home was to meet others like me, similarly unsettled. Wandering around, being unsettled had not yet attained what it is now. Now, we speak of those who wander without aim with a particular tone, a certain, “but x was so smart, had so much potential.”

30 marks a certain dividing line, at least in the world of those who don’t stay in school for way too long. But this is easy. We know it. And this story is not worth telling.

But to write it’s not worth telling is also to ask about what happens to dreaming here.

My sister and I have been engaged in an ongoing conversation about the imagination in Kenya. We have a tentative hypothesis that the imagination is reviled, even feared. For this reason, C.S. Lewis, only the greatest Christian Humanist, is accused of having written a demonic series, The Chronicles of Narnia.

I’m not yet sure how to think about the imagination here: it’s a country where the most educated believe they might be cursed at any moment, will pay sacrifices to be un-cursed, where my overly qualified medical doctor of a father bought herbs from some weird mganga to fight thrombosis—his overgrown grave tells how well that worked.

I hesitate to write that we fear the imagination—only that what we consider pragmatism always has the edge.

How, then, to think of abstractions such as peace and ethics and care, of inter-ethnic reconciliation, of futures when the present is always filled with urgencies, is always a now-time?

09.25.08

Safari Kit Ltd. at Fairview Hotel tells a story about a Kenya that I do not recognize.

A copy of John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener leers at the nubile, bare-breasted women depicted on the overpriced postcards (Shs. 60). The accompanying captions, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “African Jewels” deconstruct the ostensible distinction between tourism and sex tourism. Or make it ostensible.

I’m learning not to look at Africana sections in such stores, where reassuringly German and English names, tourist-friendly names, sell Tourist Kenya to Tourists.

The little sculptures of little African children are bucolic and unrecognizable.

Aggressive voices of business men
* * *
A security guard asks why I’m taking notes. Important people come here. I’m saved by my accent. I show him my notebook, dare him to read my scrawl, interpret its significance.

It never fails. I get a pass.
* * *
Aggressive businessmen talk loudly into their phones, in the language of exchange. “That will be x dollars which is y Euros and z shillings.” Their fluencies elude me, their pretensions are unremarkable.

Back to the bookstore.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the “most” African section lives in children’s books, where Mama Panya’s Pancakes: A Village Tale from Kenya, by Mary and Rich Chamberlain sits happily besides We All Went on Safari: A Counting Journey Through Tanzania, written by Laura Krebs.

In US libraries, Tarzan lives in the juvenilia section. In Kenyan tourist stores, Africans live in the juvenilia section, lovingly depicted by reassuringly European names.

I have often wondered how tourists visit Kenya and leave with their prejudices intact, their racial assumptions confirmed. It must be because we let them. Because we sell unrecognizable images of ourselves.
* * *
The well-scrubbed concierge wants me to leave, makes it clear I have no place here, because I don’t wear suits, don’t pay too much money to be shielded from that other Kenya, the one he has tried so desperately to escape.

Today will not be my Thiong’o moment.

My host is gracious and wonderful, and I remember the distinction between the bookstore Kenya, the Tourist Kenya, the Afro-colonial Kenya, and the Kenya of laughs and conversations and quick passions and sharp minds.

Report of the Independent Review Commission

For years, Kenyans have complained that government-appointed commissions produce reports that are never read or, if read, never followed.

The Kriegler Report has changed all this. But not quite how we might have imagined.

In one of those magical acts of reading, mis-reading, un-reading, and re-reading, the Kriegler Report has been appropriated by all sections of society, shamelessly.

Politicians from this side are saying no one won, which seems to mean that everyone won—or at least all will retain their seats. Politicians from that side are demanding apologies, not because they didn’t cheat, but because everyone cheated.

Hurrah! We are all cheats!

Though we should know better, we members of civil society continue to begin our sentences with “as a supporter of PNU/ODM, I knew x.”

1.2 million dead people might have voted, or at least remain in voter registries. (In one of those absurd Kenyan moments, perhaps we can legitimately blame the dead.)

Here is what the Kriegler Report says, in short, in clear letters, in the most precise manner: we are a failed democracy.

We are a failed democracy because we do not believe in and do not uphold citizens’ rights to elect their own leaders. We are a failed democracy because we do not believe in democratic elections.

This report is leveling.

And had we the self-consciousness to reflect on what it actually says instead of using it to justify ourselves, we might be more quiet, more hesitant to speak, less eager to point fingers and ask for apologies or reparations.

If, as the Report suggests, ECK failed in its duties, we also have to acknowledge that we failed in ours. And all the stories about what we knew, when we knew it, and how we knew it are nothing more than useless anecdotes at this point, because we allowed them to be, because we did not value democratic process enough to transform those anecdotes into part of a democratic process. Because we allowed self-appointed leaders to buy and bully their way into power.

Toward the end of Wizard of the Crow, the president, stricken by a strange malady that causes him to expand, farts. He farts long and loud and deflates in the process.

I take these two observations from the report to be part of a long fart:

• The conduct of the 2007 elections was so materially defective that it is impossible for [The Commission] or anyone else to establish true or reliable results for the presidential and parliamentary elections.
• [A]though there is room for honest disagreement as to whether there was rigging of the presidential results announced by the ECK, the answer is irrelevant, as (i) the process was undetectably perverted at the polling stage, and (ii) the recorded and reported results are so inaccurate as to render any reasonably accurate, reliable and convincing conclusions
  impossible.

Kenya lost. And we helped.

Kenya is still losing and our politicians are still helping.

09.24.08

I have been trying to figure out what to write about Neville Hoad’s recent African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (U Minnesota, 2007). Phrases in my mind include, “it is the first queer study of sub-Saharan Africa”; “Hoad’s process of assembling his archive is just as important as the final assemblage”; “Hoad re-thinks the invention of Africa through its orifices”; “Hoad is a jolly good read!”

In truth, I remain stymied by a short book that does a lot of things, some brilliantly, others less so (the chapter on Soyinka’s The Interpreters is the weakest, but the chapter on Mda’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow is stunning). Of what the book does well, I mention only two—saving the rest for the review in progress.

First, Hoad re-orients the question that has plagued studies of African homosexuality. Instead of engaging in the unanswerable, “did homosexuality exist in Africa prior to colonialism?” Hoad asks how “corporeal intimacies” come to be regarded as sexual. What constitutes sex and sexuality within colonial archives? In the broadest possible way, this statement re-thinks Foucault for Africa, claiming—this is more sotto voce in Hoad than I’d like—that Foucault’s four categories of sexuality—the Malthusian couple, the masturbating child, the hysterical woman, and the homosexual—these four categories in the “West” need to be re-thought for Africa.

This idea is stunning both in its conceptual complexity and in the doors it breaks down for we who work on African sexuality. Hoad, by the by, is amazing at breaking down doors.

Even more impressive, his re-reading of the Kabaka Mwanga scandal—Mwanga is accused of martyring catholic pages at his court because they would not “give in to his desires”—urges us to re-think African archives. Instead of engaging in the strange search for mentions of “African homosexuality,” we can read through the archives to understand how the very process of archive constitution became sexualized, and was, in fact was one mode of inventing Africans. (In conversation, I have claimed that this one chapter makes the entire book worthwhile! And I would love to see it excerpted in a wide-ranging anthology on Queer African Sexualities—any publisher willing to take me up on this?)

This is not to repeat the claim that Africans were hypersexualized—in fact, those of us who have spent some time with archives know that Africans were hyper- and hypo-sexualized, that African sexualities proliferate in the archives in much more complex ways than our Afro-Victorian research strategies have allowed us to recognize. (Afro-Victorian is Simon Gikandi’s coinage.)

Here there’s a broader question of how our research strategies, research questions, and research assumptions have both helped and hindered our approaches to African sexualities.

Hoad’s queer approach—and it is queer—to the problem of homosexuality in Africa raises vital and important questions about the relationship of queer scholarship, queer methods, to the field of African homosexualities.

Put otherwise, Hoad, and, indeed, the study of sexuality in Africa, must contend with how to read the history of homosexuality in Africa alongside the vexed (and perhaps longer) history of queering in Africa. Not simply as a matter of how “the West” queered Africa, but also how we can and should read African strategies of queering: how do Africans queer other Africans and to what end?

More generally, what is the status of “the homosexual” within queer studies? I continue to wrestle with this.

I’m veering off course. Damn book. Excites my neurons.

Second, Hoad has a more extended argument, which emerges in pieces, about the relationship between religion, predominantly Christianity, and sexuality in Africa. I have argued in my own work that we cannot conceive of modern sexuality in Africa without going through religion—the first Gikuyu-language dictionaries are created by or at least in consultation with missionaries. As a recorded, written language, Gikuyu is already embedded within religious discourse. And as Bishop Akinola’s pronouncements in Nigeria demonstrate, the church continues to wield enormous influence over what we consider sexuality—that we go to church and then fornicate (usually not in church) does not invalidate the church’s ability to shape sexual discourse, if not sexual mores. Especially when it comes to homosexuality.

I like the range of the book, from the late nineteenth century to the present; I like the subtle braiding of narratives; as we jump from Uganda to Nigeria to South Africa, we must ask how sexual discourses in Africa are not simply regional or national but pan-African—and why this is so.

Hoad emphasizes, repeatedly and usefully, that sexuality in Africa is African, forged through shared information, shared experiences, shared prejudices, shared ambitions.

“Jolly Good Read!”
* * *
One of Uganda’s officials has announced a plan to publish pictures of men (and women?) who pick up prostitutes in town.

Shame might accomplish something.

I am reminded of the anecdote in Megan Vaughan’s Curing Their Ills, in which missionary doctors tried to make Africans (don’t have my book, don’t remember which ones) ashamed of being treated for venereal disease.

Perverse Africans (I love them!) were very proud of receiving their injections and boasted about it.

Can we not imagine this campaign of shame similarly backfiring?

09.23.08

I think a lot about impotence.

Blame Sembene’s Xala.

Despite its masculinist pretensions (which are not necessarily heterosexist), impotence is a great metaphor for thinking along and through with. There’s the impotence that reveals itself in lack of progeny (not necessarily heterosexist) and the impotence known through whispers and smirks, one’s inability to bring pleasure to another.

One walks by sneers and smiles, hidden laughs and swallowed giggles. One cuts down phallic crops and trees, worrying that even nature mocks. One’s inability to provide pleasure inhibits one’s ability to take pleasure. And, because I’m being peri-academic, impotence is one of the great themes of African literature.

I’m thinking even more about impotence now because of the ad in the Kenyan papers for “Viagla.” I want to know whether anyone has bought it, used it, whether it works. African “Viagla.” If you have, please leave a comment and tell me whether it works.
* * *
I have often (mis)diagnosed the legacy of the Moi years as impotence, a crushing sense that one’s resistance is already anticipated and incapacitated, that, to use a real metaphor, one will be forced to drink nyayo milk, despite one’s protests.

Yes. I use drinking Nyayo milk as a queer metaphor.

Yet, what stays with me is not impotence, but hunger. We desired stories, success, the future. In my circle, one of many, we spoke of A-Team, of figures who, had we known the language, “worked the system.” When we spoke of what I now disparagingly call bang-bang movies, it was not about their faux moralism: the struggle between good and evil was less compelling than the contest of wits, the power struggles.

With a sophistication that belied our years, we focused on the how to get power rather than the why. That the world could be, should be improved, in my dim memory, never discussed.

The story of how Good Times and Dynasty, The Jeffersons and Dallas shaped our desires, our views of race relations, how we absorbed them into our national and local narratives without becoming cosmopolitan, that banal story about consumption without ethics, I’m not sure it remains to be told. But it exists.
* * *
I have wondered what it means to have impotence without the luxury of indifference or apathy.

Is this one meaning of “shauri ya mungu!” That odd Kenyan resignation with deep, unfathomable registers.

Every so often, one catches a quick glimmer of rage. But I will not write about anger today.
* * *
And then there is the impotence of having (re)produced wrongly: this, you will remember, is Madume’s problem. “Only girls.” One’s inability to fulfill a cultural mandate. One’s inability to inhabit masculinity properly. It is in such an environment that the symbolic aspects of masculinity become even more important: pangas become slashing penises when one cannot support one’s family. Cheap. Perhaps.
* * *
What might it mean to have impotence and indifference? Is this a way of re-thinking masculinity. When one laughs about one’s limpness. Do we? Can we? After all, even in cheap porn (written by straight men) trannies brag about their erections.
* * *
It is no secret that I study masculinity—when I want to justify it, I invoke some French Feminist whose name I forgot who said that men should write about masculinity. This I consider to be a feminist injunction, and I write as a feminist about men. This also, perhaps, because I live in a multi-generational house of women, from 2-65.

In what I take to be a brilliant move, Raila has started promoting circumcision because it is healthful. Have I written about this before? I don’t remember, and I’m too lazy to check. What Atieno Odhiambo has discussed as “the obstacle” for Luo men is being torn down foreskin by foreskin. (Perhaps we should, in good absurd fashion, create a chain of foreskins from Nyanza to State House.)

This worries me because it valorizes one kind of morphological masculinity as a political ideal, as the price one must pay.

Presidency by Foreskin.

We might as well include a shorn penis on our national currency.

Potency: not just what you do, but how you are shaped to do what you do.
* * *
But we also know the cheapness of circumcision.

I remain intrigued by the images of mostly poor urban workers, men, who, when bathing together would discover one of their members was unshorn, would take up a collection, march him to wherever and “man” him.

Whether the absence of a foreskin improved his economic life—we know it may have his cultural life, at least among a limited circle of men—we don’t know.
* * *
So much
Depends

On a
Foreskin

Dripping with
Fresh

blood

09.22.08

In 1971, Heinemann Educational Books published an abridged version of Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya. I have yet to research how or whether this book was used within schools, but it was reprinted at least six times between its first publication and 1991 (1972, 1973, 1975, 1981, 1984, 1987). Again, I have yet to find out whether it has been subsequently republished.

This abridged version breaks completely from LSE, Malinowski, and Kenyatta’s diasporic community in England (C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Ras Makonnen, Amy Garvey, Peter Abraham).

Absent from this version is also Kenyatta’s fictionalized autobiography—no stories of having experienced everything of which he writes, no justifications for his writing, no rationale for the book, no tortured prose that attempts to negotiate between the Euro-colonial language of anthropology and a still nascent nationalist vernacular.

Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta writes in his new Foreword, sought to “impact . . . those who had no real knowledge of how Africans lived and thought and organised their own societies.”

The book, Kenyatta writes in a boast he first formulates in his introduction to the 1966 Kiswahili translation, “had much of the effect that was intended—and as the years have gone by—it has kept alive and been consulted as literature long after any political purpose has been swallowed up by history.” (The first edition sold 501 copies and had a negligible impact until 1954, when it was resurrected to explain Kenyatta and Mau Mau, and even then it had a negligible impact.)

In what can only be described as a disingenuous gesture, Kenyatta naturalizes the ideological effects of Facing Mount Kenya: its conception of the Gikuyu as one people with one purpose, its valorization of circumcision as the tool for creating national masculinity, the continuing impact of Gikuyu and GEMA politics on constitutional issues.

Kenyatta’s distinction between “political purpose” and “literature” is similarly disingenuous, but this is less important, I think, than his calm acceptance that the text can be—should be?—read as literature.

His awareness of the text’s literariness thrills me, in part because like Simon Gikandi, who similarly recognizes Facing Mount Kenya’s fictionality, I have tried to argue in my own work that thinking through this text as an intricately constructed work of anthro-fiction, which shares more, in terms of method, with those texts of armchair anthropology than the detailed fieldwork Malinowski advocates, allows us to re-think much of what we have thought of as Gikuyuness and Kenyanness, as masculinity and ethno-politics.

If this school edition was widely disseminated in Kenya, was taught, in fact, as Facing Mount Kenya, we also face an interesting question of canonicity: that what we have thought of as Facing Mount Kenya in Kenya might be substantially different from what we scholars and students of anthropology read.

This school edition also explains, in part, how Kenyatta becomes self-generating, a man needing no introduction. Here there’s a longer argument I’ve made elsewhere about the temporality of Facing Mount Kenya as a text that slips in and out of time—at times Kenyatta employs allochronic time, often, I suspect, when he doesn’t quite know what he is writing about, other times the text occupies the present of its writing. Like this temporally unstable text, Kenyatta becomes temporally unstable across his prefaces, his tone changing from the strained belligerence of the first (1938) to the nationalist arrogance of the second (1966) to this final assured authority (1971).

Those of us who claim to be theoretically sophisticated (which means queer, ask Joseph Litvak) have often been content to write that traditions are invented, and have believed that revealing fiction as fictional performs some function. But the critique of tradition and of culture requires persistence, continuity, not de-bunking, as some would have it, but careful explication and critique. This I write as a reminder of why I continue to think and write about Kenyatta and his legacy.

Not to mention, his ghost still haunts me.