Haki Ya Kuishi

Ili kuhakisha kwamba una haki ya kuishi
—Warembo Ni Yes

Warembo Ni Yes, a coalition of Kenyan women activists with the beautifully translated name “beauties are yes” articulate wisely and rightly what is at stake in the political: the right to live—haki ya kuishi. In their support for the Yes campaign, they express their hope for a constitution that will recognize women as full human beings, as Shailja Patel explained in a recent interview.

The right to live. Full humanity.

These are more than empty phrases. They capture the power of state documents to denude humanity, to create sub-classes of humans through a range of legal measures. To offer just one example, under the current Kenyan law, women who marry foreigners have no way to provide those partners with access to citizenship. Citizenship is passed from husbands to wives. It is an archaic law that speaks, all too well, to the continuing hold of patriarchy in this country. I will note, in passing, that all our wrangling over ethnicity and corruption has done little to challenge the hold of patriarchy. Patriarchal politics proceed relatively unchecked.

Like Warembo Ni Yes, I support the right to full humanity. As a feminist, I celebrate a Constitution that finally begins to recognize women as full citizens.

And then I run into an all-too familiar problem: the split allegiances that seem to forever encumber progressive politics. There is a story behind this. Let me offer a truncated version.

In 2006, the Kenyan Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Law. A long time in the making, the law recognized that Kenya had few effective mechanisms to deal with sexual violations against women and girls and men and boys. The laws on the books were ineffective, often rendered in the language of morality rather than crime (an offense against morality rather than an assault against a person, for instance).

The process leading up to the passing of the law was contentious, demonstrating fissures between progressive and conservative Kenyans. Early on, in December 2004, progressive Kenyans had included sections in the proposed bill that would have decriminalized sodomy and prostitution. By the time the bill was officially introduced into parliament, in the early months of 2005, these provisions had been removed. As debates on the bill progressed, it contracted in scope, seeking not to protect women and girls, men and boys, but wives and daughters, husbands and sons.

The family became the target of sexual offenses. Elsewhere, I map out how this contraction happened and some of its implications. One major implication was that practices associated with creating and sustaining families could not be criminalized. In a framework devoted to protecting the family, it becomes very difficult to pass a law against marital rape.

Shortly after the bill was signed into law, attorney general Amos Wako introduced a Marriage Bill. Ostensibly designed to harmonize the various marriage arrangements protected by multiple statutes, the Marriage Bill also managed anxieties produced by the Sexual Offences law making process by specifying that marriage was a union between a man and a woman. As far as I can tell, the Bill has not proceeded much further.

But perhaps it does not have to.

The very language defining marriage as between a man and a woman has been imported into the Draft Constitution. Read carefully, the section on marriage not only refuses to allow for the possibility of same-sex marriage (which, I should note, actually has roots in Kenyan cultural practices and is not a “recent” import), but also defines gender in rigid, exclusive terms.

And while, as I have written before, I do not think same-sex marriage should be the main goal of queer activists, it is important to register how this particular suture of marriage and gender and sex works against queer activism and interests.

Thus far, Kenyan LGBTI activists have remained silent about this provision—or have not spoken loudly enough to be heard. Instead, they have argued that the new Bill of Rights provides space for intervention. While that might be true, I am not sure that a Constitution that refuses to recognize gender diversity can be used to redress discrimination based on gender status.

Quite simply: this Draft Constitution weds the status of being human, indeed, the right to be human, haki ya kuishi, to hetero-reproduction and gender normativity. It gives and takes away.

Anyone familiar with histories of race and feminism will recognize the pattern I have traced. Many black women have noted that as racial progress was made, it was wedded to a model of black patriarchy. Race before gender. And then, as women spoke up, lesbians were often sidelined. Gender before sexuality. And on it goes.

It is incredibly frustrating to keep being told that one must choose. And even more frustrating that in tedious, repetitive variations across multiple times and spaces, queers get to be the sacrificial goats. The good-natured ones asked to understand that of course their needs matter. But they are not a priority.

Even more distressing has been how the story has played out in the current Referendum campaign.

Seeking votes to support the No vote, William Ruto claimed that the Draft Constitution enabled gay marriage. In response, supporters of the Yes vote joined Ruto’s homophobia in affirming that it did not support gay marriage.

For one brief, significant moment, No and Yes met in their shared homophobia.

While this moment’s brevity might not seem to merit comment, I would argue that it tells us something very important about the construction of Kenyan identity within the political space. We may disagree on corruption and the imperial presidency and on land ownership and on abortion and on the Kadhi’s court.

We unite in our shared homophobia.

From my perspective, from a queer perspective, any victory in the Referendum is predicated on dehumanizing queers.

Of course, we could argue that sacrifices must be made and that politics is based on compromise. Yet, as I look back at the Sexual Offences Law and the Marriage Bill, as I look back over more than five years of Kenyan law-making, I must ask whether queers ever get a chance. Deals continue to be made by sacrificing queers. Over and over and over.

And the beautiful guarantee to life, haki ya kuishi, campaigned for by the wonderfully named Warembo Ni Yes? It is not even within the realm of dreaming. Not for this queer Kenyan.

President Kibaki’s Little Things

President Kibaki is fond of little things.

In a recent interview with the Sunday Nation over the fast-approaching referendum, he quipped, “In the next few days, we will work hard to make sure that those opposing it over one or two little things change their minds and support us.” The statement seems innocuous enough—for now, I hold back on commenting at length about how genuine concerns are reduced to “little things” except to note that it is a political strategy.

The phrasing seemed familiar. And so I checked.

At a National Prayer Breakfast held on June 1, 2008, Kibaki remarked on the post-election violence: “What happened was because of our little mistake but every time something comes, it goes.”

Even now, I wonder about the singular “little mistake”: was it encouraging ethnic polarization? Corrupting an election process so badly that an investigative commission declared there was no way to determine who actually won? Was it remaining stubbornly silent and uncompromising as Kenya burned and as we hacked away at each other? Was it assuming the presidency in circumstances that can only be described as shady?

What exactly was the “little mistake”?

By using the word “little,” Kibaki belittles legitimate political concerns, effaces pain and suffering, erases the many who died needlessly, and urges us to normalize injustice.

“[E]very time something comes, it goes.”

This statement can only be made by someone who stands by the side watching the traffic of history, someone incredibly disengaged and detached.

Let us be clear here: I am not indulging in Kibaki bashing. That is easy to do, and the stakes are much too low.

I am troubled by the recurrence of the troubling adjective “little,” which evidences a dangerous, irresponsible, fundamentally un-democratic approach to the world. (I am in English. We believe that much hinges on small words.)

A recent article by Martin Kimani on the meaning of work in Rwanda,where “work” was understood not as a euphemism but as the accurate description for acts of genocidal murder, helps to frame Kibaki’s statements and approach.

When Kibaki speaks of “working hard to make sure” that those opposed “change . . . minds,” I wonder about the kind of work involved. Granted, I am on the far side of speculation. But, despite the glowing hagiography written by an increasingly irrelevant Makau Mutua bolstered by the fawning idiocy of the Sunday Nation interview, Kibaki was in power during Moi’s excesses.

He was complicit and is culpable.

And his efforts to claim he stood apart and watched “things” go strikes me as remarkably disingenuous.

To take just one egregious example: he blames the post-election violence on the extraordinarily “long campaign.” In a remarkable moment of disclaiming any personal responsibility, he claims, “Long campaigns get personal, but shorter campaigns enable the electorate and candidates to engage in deeper and meaningful debate.”

Yes, lives were lost because the campaign period was too long.

There are many problems with Kibaki’s “little.” Let me mention two.

“Little” urges us to pay attention to big picture politics and claims that political dissent and critique is always tendentious, that details do not matter. In other writing, I have argued that this petty concern/big picture model is anti-intellectual and anti-democratic and has a long history in Kenya. Don’t sweat the details. Because, as Sefi Atta has it, everything good will come.

“Little” also demonstrates the contempt with which Kibaki views multi-party politics and political opposition. Granted, as John Githongo has argued, we have no opposition politics in Kenya. Our so-called coalition government is a motley collection of favor-trading, salary-raising opportunists.

So, perhaps Kibaki is right.

There are “little” differences because in “Nchi ya Kitu Kidogo” what counts above all is the little thing.

“I am not, by nature, a ‘D’ student”

A former student apologized for failing two classes he took with me in the same semester. That he apologized is itself cause for a blog post, but not this one. I am struck, instead, by the grounds of his apology. He apologized because failing is not in his “nature.” It is puzzling this sense that academic success is inherent. That being a “good” student has something to do with nature. Now, he could simply be using “nature” to describe his habits, as in, “I work very hard to perform well in all my classes.” But what a curious way to frame it: “nature.”

Even curiouser: the student had taken a previous class with me in which he earned a C for D work (inflation happens). In conversations about his work, he explained that he “reads all the books” and “attends most of the classes” and could not seem to grasp that both were preliminary stages in moving toward analysis.

The consistent problem: he does not distinguish between summary and analysis, fine though it might be. Every single paper is an extended summary of the text. Every exam question is answered with fact, not interpretation. Thus, “please explain this character’s motivation” receives “the character is bad” or “the character is old” or “the character is married.” These are possible guides to answers, but beginnings, only beginnings. They are opening sentences, partially ajar doors, no more.

How, then, I wonder, does “nature” come into it”? Is it an imprecise way of talking about labor? Or might it suggest something more interesting about how today’s students think about themselves, about the effects of testing cultures?

Perhaps what strikes me about the student’s claim is its familiarity. Having grown up and excelled in a test culture, I was, by 13, if not earlier, very aware of myself as a lazy potentially top 5 student. Able to be top 3, but really just not motivated enough. There were other things to consume my time: big, gorgeous bodice ripper novels, baking, He-Man, and She-Ra. And when I moved to high school, I simply got worse. Hovering somewhere close to failing in my second year, I casually mentioned to my student mentor that I could “easily be in the top 10 of my class” and didn’t “understand why I needed to try.” A promise, I should note, that I fulfilled.

The statement itself, much like my student’s, emerged from a test culture. A world that, granted, allowed me to measure myself against my peers and to predict (more or less accurately) my particular and peculiar skills.

What it could not account for and what I took for granted, often with deflating consequences, was labor.

While my friends studied I read novels and played piano. While they mastered the intricacies of Physics and Chemistry, I was falling in love with Puccini and Wagner. While they completed homework assignments, I was reading the latest Jackie Collins. I did put in *some* effort, that of the last minute crammer, but I preferred distractions. Knowing, like my student, that I was “by nature” a good student.

I may have been a “good” student “by nature,” but I had lousy work habits. (To be somewhat easier on myself, I was also mostly bored by the Kenyan curriculum and discovered the connection between passion and learning on becoming an English major.)

Now, we teachers can certainly try to train students about work habits. We can assign draft essays to provide feedback; direct students toward sources; offer writing advice through short(er) writing assignments. We can also note and praise promising lines of thought and suggest strategies that will help students develop those lines of thought. We can be excited about students’ work—I use much exclamania™. We can try, in other words, to deepen the relationship between nature and labor.

Of course, the story is not that simple.

Many students work very hard. They write multiple drafts, consult with writing coaches, attend office hours, write and revise. And, granted, their work will generally improve from an F to a C. One hesitates to write about aptitudes, but we do have different passions and talents. The student who cannot grasp queer theory might well become a fabulous reader of Tarzan or an incredible critic of Buffy. We teachers need to remember our own moments of weakness—I am, as a good friend keeps reminding me, not at all qualified to teach medieval literature, lacking the requisite 5 or 6 languages.

And perhaps the point is even simpler: that we can teach students to be impersonal about their scholarship. To understand the strange blend of labor and intuition and pure luck—the moment when a text sings to us—that often helps us create strong arguments. That, less simply, we can push and nudge students toward excellence without invoking that dreaded word, “potential,” that reinforces students’ sense that their natures live on a +/- scale.

Needless to say, teaching students to be impersonal will also help manage the kinds of affective intensities attached to evaluation. Performing badly on a paper or in a class does not reflect something inherent about one’s nature.

I am not offering a too-easy prescription. Teaching students to be impersonal takes labor. It requires untraining habits inculcated by a test culture. And this, as I know too well, is a Herculean task. I fall victim to my test culture upbringing all the time. But I have also learned the value of consistent habits: writing daily, reading daily, drafting and revising, soliciting feedback, revising some more.

I do not claim that I do all of these consistently or necessarily with any degree of success. Essays still remain stubborn, arguments gnarled, thoughts emergent rather than realized, and my knotty prose requires many un-knottings. But I am less willing to believe in the power of inherent ability or intuition, and much more willing to cultivate healthy habits.

Can we inculcate similar values in our students?

Fear & The August 4 Referendum

In a timely news segment, Rachel Maddow demonstrates how fear is used as a political strategy. As, in fact, the most successful political strategy. She argues, convincingly, that we tend to think effective political strategies depend on maligning one’s opponents. And that might be wrong. The best strategy (and here I am extrapolating) creates affect-coalitions: not people who think or believe the same things, but people who feel the same things.

The strategy creating fear-driven affect-coalitions has dominated the Kenyan referendum process. From Christians being warned that the Kadhi courts will impose Sharia law to social conservatives being cautioned that the Draft Constitution will permit gay marriage to the biggest fear driver of all, that without a new Constitution, we will descend into post-election violence again. Other fears abound. That the Draft Constitution will simply prop up ethno-cracies, that rejecting it will destroy fragile government coalitions, that our feelings about and actions toward the future rest solely or predominantly on this document.

And I have wondered why we cannot talk around this document. Why we grant the fear mongers the power to drive this process. I have wondered why we continue to believe that our abilities to shape and share the future depend on sets of legal codes. How have we come to believe that elegantly wrought codes will produce ethical relations? How have we come to trust legal documents more than we trust ourselves?

I worry that our faith in constitutions demonstrates a corresponding attenuation of our faith in ourselves. That we have lost not only the ability but the will to envision living together. And that we hope the constitution will restore some of that faith.

Not all of this is bad.

It is possible to envision the constitution, all constitutions, as promises we give to each other. As shared goals and aspirations. As guides to good faith and guarantors of expectations. It is possible to envision the constitution as more than the zero-sum game conjured up by the politics of fear. And it should be possible to say that the texture of our lives together, the ethical orientations we have toward each other, the mutual obligations of care need not be anchored in any particular legal document. That the document is not what imposes how we can feel about each other, but expresses, rather, a commitment to uphold ethical actions.

I sketch here an overly optimistic vision. One that insists, perhaps against reason, that the referendum process does matter and should matter, but not too much. One that looks at August 8, 2010, August 9, 2011, August 10, 2012, and sees a Kenya in which the Christians and the Muslims live in harmony; in which the heterosexuals and the homosexuals acknowledge each others’ shared humanity; in which the urban and the rural aspire to environmentally sustainable practices; in which the politician and the citizen share resources equitably; in which the bosses and the workers create and share profits ethically.

We can share much more beyond winning and losing. We can share tomorrow and the tomorrows that follow.

Storymoja Hay Festival Poetry Competition

Malawi Dossier: Conversation with Unoma Azuah

6/4/2010

Keguro,

I am interested in this project but the frame is still blurry to me. Do you want my/a response to the arrest or would you want a picture that paints Africans as sensitive to human rights?

More clarification would help a great deal.

Thanks in anticipation.

Unoma

Dear Unoma,

Thanks for your speedy reply and sorry for my tardy one–I have been out all day and just got home.

In truth, I am still kind of blurry about the dossier idea myself.

The original impetus was simply that African intellectuals must be able to say something, mostly to compensate for what seems like a very determined effort on the part of media in Europe and the US not to interview or ask any intellectuals what they think.

That said, I also did not want what we said to be a response to media abroad, because that structure centers that media as what is important, not the case.

I think the case raises complex questions about the ongoing nationalist project (so, when the Malawi president claimed the “boys” offended “our culture, our laws, our tradition,” which is a fascinating statement about how Malawi identity is being constructed. It also raises questions about human rights and sexual rights—in the vein, are sexual rights human rights? Are there any African and Africanist paradigms that can help explain this? I think there are interesting questions about how gender is being constructed. Also, the place of religious discourse in shaping these proceedings. The notions of duress raised in the court case—sorry, I have been compiling a list of stuff for some time.)

What I would be most interested in is any kind of intervention that need not focus on the case necessarily, but can raise both broad and narrow questions.

I hope this is somewhat useful.

If you are interested, I can forward the trial case to you—I have the case and it makes for fascinating reading.

Thank you so much for your interest.

Keguro

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6/5/2010

Keguro,

Thanks much! I’d love to have a copy of the trial.

In the meantime, the president’s opinion that the boys offended the Malawian culture rings true to an extent in the sense that sex is almost seem as a public/communal property in most African countries. In other words, sex is not looked upon as a mere private act if you look at it from the sense that reproduction is paramount in the African culture. Hence, the act of sex in the sense that it produces children is more or less why it is looked upon as “affecting the community.” So the issue of individual rights does not come into play.

However, when you think about what adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms, it indeed becomes a human right issue because it does not affect the way the Malawian people conduct their daily businesses neither does it make the lives of the average African gain better quality of life.

I await the case. Thanks again!

Unoma

Dear Unoma,

That is such a great insight, and one that, I think, needs to be aired in some fuller way. Some of my work thinks about how this idea of a collective sexuality comes about, so how it moves from being an ethnic preoccupation, among the Gikuyu, for instance, to becoming ethno-national. And also how it helps to bind the nation in particular ways.

I am attaching the file to this email as a pdf. Let me know if you have problems opening it.

best,

Keguro

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Dear Keguro,

My understanding is that Africa is matrifocal and therefore emphasizes the need for children, motherhood, fatherhood and of course family including extended family system. In that light homosexuality, male or female goes against this core family centeredness. Some have speculated that because Africans depend a lot on land for farming, there is/was always the focus on producing and rearing children not just as farm hands but also for the sustenance of the family system. This is a way to ensure the longevity of community/communities. So anything that mitigates/runs against that strategy is usually seen as an offense to the culture.

On the other hand, African society has also always carved out a space for the so called “abnormal,” be it in attributing certain traits to supernatural forces, or even in going further to see some spiritual powers attributed to some of the people classified as abnormal, these group of people though in the margins were/are not invisible.

Things are changing in the sense that it is even becoming more difficult for some families to bear the burden of maintaining the extended family way of life, especially as more and more Africans continue to adapt the western life style be it in the mass movement of the rural peoples to the urban areas, be it in the massive migration of Africans to the west or even in the effect of globalization (media).

My point is that as they say, culture is dynamic and Africa can not help but be part of the great shift in culture which will include a better and more objective assessment of sexuality/homosexuality issues. I believe that homosexuality has always existed in Africa; it is after all not a cultural phenomenon, neither is it a disease, but whatever threatens the status quo is definitely always given the hammer blow.

The Malawi case—a case in point.

Unoma

6/6/10

Dear Unoma,

I have been trying to think about two different angles on African intimacies more generally, not simply about Malawi. The first has been to think about practices of intimate diversity, to insist on the range of desires and acts across the continent, and to refuse a certain story that claims African practices can be termed one thing or another.

For instance, in recently discovered stuff—recent because I am not trained in anthropology—I found a claim that one group of the Kipsigis in Kenya described another group as practicing homosexuality. Granted the source is colonial-era, and that is always a problem, but it suggested to me that intimate diversity exists within ethnic groups as well as between them and that, in fact, it is one of the elements used to distinguish within and between these groups.

I have been interested in seeing whether a concept of intimate diversity is more useful than the binary between homosexual and heterosexual which, I tend to think, can often obscure more than it helps, because of the many histories attached to it (Stonewall and so on).

A related portion of my work is very much aligned with what you have suggested: Africa is a dynamic, ever evolving space. I think there’s an idea that it is evolving or has evolved into a western imitation, an assessment with which I disagree. Looking at African hip-hop, for instance, the array of languages and influences are massive and it is such a hybrid genre.

I was always very amused when Kenyans learned how to dance from the Congolese!

There are all kinds of borrowings and sharings from all over the world, from other parts of Africa, from Asia, from the Caribbean, and so on. And in my academic and personal writing, I have tried to think about these borrowings as being productive practices in which we are always engaged with the world and with each other. So, part of what disturbs me about this Malawi case is the closing of ranks, the idea that there is a singular Malawi culture or religion—last I checked, Malawi was not a theocracy nor was it monocultural.

Now, I understand the nationalist claims for one culture, but I am also deeply critical of them.

And there is also the class structure aspect of the case that is so terrifying: for the most part, these young men are not highly educated, do not have high-power jobs, are actually pretty low on the economic scale. And so this case, like so many across the world, is about how we think about subaltern populations: I want to resist the sense that in writing about this case we are performing a kind of missionary labor.

I am not yet sure I have the right language with which to think about class, not yet. But I think it is so crucial, even as we think broadly about Africa’s pasts and presents, that we acknowledge the fundamental class injustice at the root of the case. This case could not have been made against well-connected middle, upper-middle class, and elite Malawi citizens. Which is not to say they don’t suffer their own forms of oppression—if Kenya and Uganda are any example, then there is probably some blackmail going on.

I think this is why the dossier idea is so important, because there are so many issues to write about, so many angles and perspectives.

Thanks for continuing to engage with me in this dialogue. It is helping me to think.

Keguro

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Keguro,

I see your point, and I share some of your concerns even though I see it differently in some aspects of African music today. In Nigeria for example, musicians that use Nigerian language, etc do well. But there is a crop of Nigerian musicians who try so much to be like American gangsta rappers or RB singers and it makes my heart bleed when I see them.

I always wonder why some of them would not use some of the rich strands of our folkloric music for instance or at least merge what we have with what they borrow, instead of merely being poor copycats. We are indeed losing some of ours while trying to swallow whole what we can never be the best at.

Don’t get me wrong: appropriation is not entirely a negative development, but when we imbibe/copy without holding on to at least some of ours, it becomes disconcerting. The same things are reflected in the Nigerian movies called Nollywood. In some of these movies, you see actors trying to speak like Americans, and they do such a shoddy job of mimicking American accents.

In the area of African culture being liberal/diversified in sexual spaces, I do agree. Sexual may not be the exact word in this context but there are cultures in Nigeria for example where women marry women. The interesting thing here though becomes the fact that these practices are done to re-enforce the patriarchy. The woman marries a woman to maintain her father’s lineage.

In Northern Nigeria, there are cases of the so-called “Dan Daudi” a practice that affirms the existence of drag queens. These men are patronized by older and mostly rich Hausa men. Their communities accepted it until the fire of sharia was ignited in Nigeria. So, yes. I agree entirely on Africa’s room for sexual diversity that can not just be boxed into the binaries of heterosexuality or homosexuality.

The class issue is a very familiar one as well, because as they say in Nigeria, “When money/affluence speaks, bullsh*t works.”

Class is a universal subject that may not necessarily be restricted to culture or nation.

It’s unfortunate that the two Malawian young men became victims.

I do believe as you said that if they were upper class people, none of this would have happened. The case would have been squashed as there was the case in Cameroon years ago when some politicians were listed as indulging in homosexual practices. The publication of their names may have been out of malice, it may have been out of true life recounts, but such cases were squashed.

I will go further to applaud Stephen and Tiwonge’s courage; they would have been mobbed by “jungle” justice. Did they have the opportunity to deny that they are homosexuals? I wonder—that would have been the most convenient thing to do. I guess I will find out when I read the trial. I may have to try a cyber cafe for opening attachments. I am still struggling with that technical problem.

Unoma

6/24/10

Dear Unoma,

So, now Stephen is [engaged to be] married and Tiwonge seems to have disappeared from view—is safe, but they are no longer together. And we have the World Cup!

I was thinking today of how certain cases and ideas slide away from view, as though they are “disappeared,” to use that too-familiar term.

For the western media, the spectacle is done. Western influence won—a few Africans were “saved” and we can go back to looking for the next crisis. For Africans, or so it seems, the case was always irrelevant, not worth thinking about, or, conversely, was shameful, so we’re glad to sweep it out of our collective hut and return to the familiar things we need to tackle: poverty, hunger, corruption, gender inequality, and so on.

I think this characterization is unfair, but not entirely wrong. And it reminds me a lot of what happens, in general, to questions around women and gender in Africa. Solutions proposed. Discussed loudly. Rarely implemented.

And we are back to the familiar—this is the case with Kenya’s recent Sexual Offenses Bill which, to my knowledge, has had no real palpable effect, despite the loud volume of noise that went into it.

And the reason I bring the Kenyan case up is that I think a lot of sexual minority activism gets it wrong by failing to link specific cases with broader national and pan-African initiatives for liberation.

Sorry, a little polemical there.

Keguro

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6/26/10

Dear Keguro,

The speculation that Stephen is now married or engaged is distressing to say the least. What a way to compensate for the “shame” inflicted on his country.

Yes, that spectacle is over, and on to other things. Africa has indeed been forced to save some of its own. As sad as it may sound, the West has a strong hold on Africa, be it in sanctions, be it in threatening to stop all economic ties/aid, etc. It does as well seem that we need the West sometimes to call us to order.

I remember when Nigeria was trying to pass a new bill that would not only further criminalize homosexuality but went as far as threatening the lives of gay activists and gay associates. The then Minister for foreign affairs practically denied the existence of homosexuals in Nigeria. He claimed that the only person that contacted him/his department on behalf of homosexuals was a lady who was pregnant. Perhaps, he was insinuating that since the lady was pregnant she couldn’t possibly be a lesbian.

My point really, is that often “we” put ourselves in very embarrassing situations, Kenya and Uganda included, and then wait for the West to let us know that some of our views are questionable. Homosexuality is a human thing, it is neither a disease nor a cultural phenomenon. And the sooner Africans understand this sensitive issue the better for all of us, among the many other political “blunders” we put ourselves in thereby giving the West extra tools to beat us on the head.

On failing to link specific cases with broader national and pan-African initiatives for liberation, I entirely agree with you. And it becomes laughable when certain things are tagged African and others not. For example, a top government official in Nigeria has 6 wives and when he was asked about that, his response is that he is an African man. That is, polygamy in its most appalling sense is “African” but homosexuality is “unAfrican.” Please! Give me a freaking break, as some Americans would say. One aspect of our ill is indeed a reflection of the general conditions we grapple with, and as you rightly said, it may not be fair but it is what it is.

Unoma

6/27/10

Dear Unoma,

Kenyan writers have been thinking about this forgetting that we are so often called to do.

After the 2008 post-election violence, many politicians urged us to forget and move on. So, there’s a broader issue about how the politics of forgetting seems so central to African politics, as though remembering is something unbearable.

I don’t want to make this forgetting of Steven and Tiwonge exceptional. Instead, it should be thought alongside other kinds of forgetting that let injustice continue.

Billy Kahora, a friend and the managing editor of Kwani?, has a great book out on a guy called David Munyakei, who helped to expose one of the biggest economic scandals in Kenya’s history. Munyakei does not exist within the popular Kenyan mind. It is as though we need to forget not only the embarrassing incidents, but also the people who revealed them, even when we might be indebted to those people. And I am not sure what to blame: is it something about tradition and shame? Or is it something about how politics is played?

Maybe that’s what we should title this whole conversation: Forgetting Steven and Tiwonge.

Keguro

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6/29/10

Keguro,

Even Nigeria so badly wants to forget the Biafran war, Ibrahim B. Babangida the former military leader of Nigeria desperately wants us to forget that he misruled Nigeria and cancelled one of the most credible elections Nigerians held to have Abiola as the next president. We should forget history and give him a second chance. Further Steven and Tiwonge need to be urgently forgotten because they have shamed us and actually deserved to die. If their pardon was necessitated by the need for justice or by the pressure from the West, we may never know.

But forgetting does not mean that the wound is healed, it does not mean that the problem has gone away, it does say of us that we’d rather sweep things under the carpet rather than confront them. Hence we fuel the fire of the stereotypical images the western media is so eager to paint of us.

My heart reaches out to Steven and Tiwonge and hopes that they survive the attempt to get their names erased from the annals of history. That they remain loyal to the fight for sexual rights pertaining to two consenting unrelated adults, and that they live their lives as they desire to and have a right to, and not be forced into a correctional partnership where heterosexual marriage becomes the ultimate form of appeasing their communities for putting them through “shame.”

Unoma

Langston Hughes, “Joy”

I went looking for Joy,
Slim, dancing Joy,
Gay, laughing Joy,
Bright-eyed Joy–
And I found her
Driving the butcher’s cart
In the arms of the butcher boy!
Such company, such company,
As keeps this young nymph, Joy!

Langston Hughes, 1926

Whispers from a Safe Place, Perhaps a Closet

Despite many years of training myself to write through fear, and to speak anticipating indifference, if not malice, I am, once again, in a too-familiar space: trying to make a case for something dismissed as relatively unimportant, my life.

I cannot trust that such a life has any value in the Kenyan space. Those who love me best warn me to stay away, afraid that what they value in me will be destroyed. Capricious bullets fly. And I continue to fear cutting glances. A notebook full of dreams languishes in a place that still hopes home might be possible. Even as such a possibility slips away.

Even now, I cannot trust that this writing will be read or, if read, will matter beyond my circle of intimates. One traces letters in eroding soil. And hopes whispers travel along red dust.

I cannot sustain this, and cannot even seem to start.

Let me begin from a safe place: my scholarship.

The (mostly) male architects of the black diaspora in the twentieth century agreed on very few things. The Marxists among them, George Padmore being a prime one, could not support the bourgeois dreams of a Jomo Kenyatta; those striving to be cosmopolitan like Peter Abrahams could not get behind the nationalist ambitions of a Kwame Nkrumah; the Africa-focused figures like E.W. Blyden could not support the allegiance felt by African Americans who insisted the U.S. was their home; Marcus Garvey, having imbibed Blyden’s lessons, did not trust the phenotypic variations of those he termed “impure”; and deep fissures emerged between those who sought national independence and those who favored remaining departments of colonial powers—this more in francophone spaces.

Put otherwise, these figures could not agree on the aim of their politics; on whether they shared race; on whether they had the same economic aspirations; or whether they cohered as a “they.” And the histories of their antagonisms (partly told in Carol Polsgrove’s new book) are crucial in understanding the diasporic presents we inhabit.

The one thing most of the major players agreed on: intimate life. Family was important. Heterosexuality was key. Heterosexual marriage, whether monogamous or polygamous, was a steady foundation. Arguably, the foundation “without which not,” to adapt a line from Kenneth Burke.

One influential strand of the black diaspora, arguably the most important, running from Blyden to Fanon, coheres on intimate ground.

It coheres through creating a zone of what Judith Butler terms “abjects,” more simply queers. The queer is the necessary outside to what comes together as “the” black diaspora.

Let me leave the (relatively) safe space.

*

Attempting to sway the upcoming Referendum, William Ruto has claimed the Proposed Constitution supports gay marriage.

In response, many Kenyans, even progressive Kenyans, have pointed out that the proposed constitution says no such thing.

From the Mars Group:

The Proposed Constitution in section 45 (2) is clear as to what marriages are to be legal in Kenya should it be passed at the Referendum of August 4, 2010. In sum, section 45(2) of the Proposed Constitution of Kenya clearly states that “Every adult has the right to marry a person of the opposite sex, based on the free consent of the parties.”

Embedding this particular section within the Proposed Constitution:

Family
Section 45.

(1) The family is the natural and fundamental unit of society and the necessary basis of social order, and shall enjoy the recognition and protection of the State.
(2) Every adult has the right to marry a person of the opposite sex, based on the free consent of the parties.
(3) Parties to a marriage are entitled to equal rights at the time of the marriage, during the marriage and at the dissolution of the marriage.
(4) Parliament shall enact legislation that recognises—
(a) marriages concluded under any tradition, or system of religious, personal or family law; and
(b) any system of personal and family law under any tradition, or adhered to by persons professing a particular religion,
to the extent that any such marriages or systems of law are consistent with this Constitution.

The Mars Group rightly call out Ruto on his “bigotry.” But against whom precisely is he bigoted? The words homophobia and transphobia appear nowhere in their article.

Following a well-established pattern, one that I can trace over the past century of black diaspora writing (though my book ends in the 1960s), opposing camps come together in supporting an intimate foundation that creates and excludes queers.

Let me be clear: I do not consider gay marriage to be the signal that full parity has been achieved with heterosexuals. Heterosexual privilege is much more diffuse. And while, like my colleague and mentor, Roxie’s typist, I celebrate those who choose to join their lives together in marriage and support their right to do so, I have no interest in hitching my wagon to that particular horse.

This legislation is much more insidious because it anchors sex and gender in hetero-reproduction. Men are men. Women and women. No one else exists. And this sex-gender suturing gains its full meaning within hetero-marriage and hetero-reproduction.

As progressive Kenyans celebrate “catching” Ruto lying, I wonder about that sense of disappointment I feel: their joy is predicated, in part, on a not-so-subtle erasure of “people like me.”

As I watch hopeful Kenyans anticipate a better future should the Proposed Constitution be adopted, I wonder about its hidden costs. I wonder about the queers it needs to disavow to create a “better” Kenya.

A “better” Kenya is one without its queers.

This cuts. Deeply.

It cuts because it is so familiar.

And it cuts because I already know all the arguments: I need to see the “big picture.”  A “better” Kenya should not be held up because of my “idiosyncratic” desires. Once we get a “better” Kenya maybe something can be done for “people like me.”

Big picture. Sacrifice. Big Picture. Be Unselfish. Big Picture.

Maybe the artist will paint in a little closet.

Dissertation-Era Writing

Although issues of gender normativity and social respectability run through Afro-diasporic discourse from at least the mid nineteenth century, the genealogical imperative comes into its own at the precise moment when black diaspora studies and black studies in general were being institutionalized in the 1960s and 1970s. The implications of this historical coincidence range far too widely to be covered here. Suffice to say, the genealogical imperative, with its focus on the (re)production of normative gender relationships, the importance of kinship relations, the importance of familial descent, and the policing of queer sexualities, all of these became foundational elements to black cultural and intellectual discourse in ways whose full impact we have yet to trace. I focus on a U.S. context here not only because it provides one of the clearest examples of how a genealogical model develops, but also because the U.S., for a variety of historical, institutional, and financial reasons, becomes one of the key centers for diasporic scholarship in the twentieth century.

Perhaps the most important incitement to discourse for emerging black studies was Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous The Negro Family: The Case for Action (1965). Moynihan portrayed a black family in crisis, fractured by the legacy of slavery, urbanization, and female-led households. In response, black scholars were eager to disprove Moynihan’s thesis and to demonstrate the enduring bonds of kinship. Influential and often disparate studies including Carol Stack’s All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (1974), Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and in Freedom, 1750-1925 (1974), John Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1979), and Richard Price and Sidney Mintz’s The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (1976) emphasized the enduring strength and longevity of heterosexual kinship bonds, in slavery and in freedom.

Here, let me tread carefully: these studies did not reify the “Black Family” in any singular or unproblematic way. Many criticized Moynihan for framing black community relations through the lens of a normative, white nuclear family. For instance, drawing on Stack, Mintz and Price write, “One of the problems with traditional studies of the black family . . . was a tendency to reify the concept of ‘family’ itself. . . . [I]n Afro-America, the ‘household’ unit need by no means correspond to ‘the family,’ however defined.”[1] They follow this correction by focusing on the historical role of kinship during slavery, asking, “What, if anything, might have constituted a set of broadly shared ideas brought from Africa in the realm of kinship?” (66) Their speculative answer is instructive for understanding the role of kinship in black studies:

Tentatively and provisionally, we would suggest that there might have been certain widespread fundamental ideas and assumptions about kinship in West and Central Africa. Among these, we might single out the sheer importance of kinship in structuring interpersonal relations and in defining an individual’s place in society; the emphasis on unilineal descent, and the importance to each individual of the resulting lines of kinsmen, living and dead, stretching backward and forward through time, or, on a more abstract level, the use of land as a means of defining both time and descent, with ancestors venerated locally, and with history and genealogy both being particularized in specific pieces of ground. The aggregate of newly arrived slaves, though they had been torn from their own local kinship networks, would have continued to view kinship as the normal idiom of social relations. Faced with an absence of real kinsmen, they nevertheless modeled their new social ties upon those of kinship. (66)

While their critique of “family” is well taken, this turn toward kinship reinstates literal and symbolic means of genealogical descent as the basis for social being. Especially toward the end of the passage, the tentative nature at the beginning, “would suggest,” “might single out,” becomes bolder, “nevertheless modeled.” This move from tentative speculation to bold declaration exemplifies the foundational myth of what Hortense Spillers terms “the inviolable ‘Black Family’” a “structure [that] remains one of the supreme social achievements of African-Americans under conditions of enslavement.”[2] But if the term “family” remained more metaphoric than real, a figure of speech that described fictive kinship bonds, it was still structured as primarily heterosexual and reproductive. Varied terms such as “family,” “community,” “kinship,” “nation,” and even the very notion of “politics,” were filtered through a heteronormative lens.

By no means am I suggesting that a black heteronormative discourse emerged without challenge. Important figures such as Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith critiqued the heterosexist strain of what Dwight McBride has aptly termed “straight black studies.”[3] However, these critiques struggled against the not-so-subtle injunction that “representative” black scholars, artists, and activists should champion forms of gender and sexual normativity. McBride explains, for example, that James Baldwin attempted to position himself as a speaker “for the race” by “masking his specificity, his sexuality, his difference” (223). Interviewed on the Dick Cavett Show, Baldwin claimed to be defending his “wife,” his “woman,” and his “children” (222), positioning himself as a black heterosexual patriarch so that he could speak as a “race man.” Even figures publicly known to be queer often adopted the veneer of heteronormativity to speak for and to “the race.”

We cannot underestimate the ongoing influence of Moynihan’s report, especially in terms of the stark oppositions that it has posed for black studies: community or oblivion. We can mark the impact of this discourse by staging an implicit debate between political scientist Cathy Cohen and cultural critic Rinaldo Walcott, a debate that takes place on the unsettled and unsettling terrain of black queer studies. Advancing a queer critique of “identity categories,” Cohen clarifies that she is not advocating their “destruction or abandonment,” clarifying, “We must reject a queer politics that seems to ignore in its analysis of the usefulness of traditionally named categories the roles of identity and community as paths to survival, using shared experiences of oppression and resistance to build indigenous resources, shape consciousness, and act collectively.”[4] Cohen’s invocations of “identity” and “community” implicitly derive from a post-Moynihan perspective that conflates identity with community. To abandon either “identity” or “community” would be to risk oblivion, to step off the well-tested paths to “survival.” Queer critique is welcome but, as my piano teacher once had it, ma non troppo (not too much). Walcott succinctly comments, “community as a discourse and a practice remains the fetish of the black studies project.”[5] Given the importance of identity and community within black studies, Walcott poses some ground-clearing questions: “Is black queer studies the improper subject of the black studies project? Or can black queer studies even reside within the confines of the black studies project proper?” (91)

One possible answer comes from Robert Reid-Pharr’s collection of essays Black Gay Man. Reid-Pharr uses the title of his book to frame three separate sections; ultimately, however, each section bleeds into the next. Of particular interest is where the final essay in the section “Black” ends and the first essay in the section “Gay” begins. The concluding essay in “Black,” titled “At Home in America,” ruminates on the ostensibly perpetual “crisis” of the black family. As the essay ends, he asks, “What lies beyond the black family and its constant production, however awkward, of black people, with their black problems and black crises?”[6] This set of concerns marks the end of the section “Black” and announces the opening of the section “Gay,” a section that opens with the bold declaration,

If there is one thing that marks us as queer, a category that is somehow different, if not altogether distinct, from the heterosexual, then it is undoubtedly our relationship to the body, particularly the expansive ways in which we utilize and combine vaginas, penises, breasts, buttocks, hands, arms, feet, stomachs, mouths and tongues in our expressions of not only intimacy, love, and lust but also and more importantly shame, contempt, despair, and hate. (“Dinge” 85)

This particular turn suggests that “beyond” the black family lies the embodied, desiring queer. Indeed, the essay “Dinge” focuses on queer interracial intimacy without once mentioning the black family. Implicitly, the black queer is the figure “beyond” the black family. How this “beyond” should be read, however, is an ongoing problem for black queer studies.

Although I have suggested that structurally Black Gay Man seems to rupture the relationship between black and queer, it might be more accurate to claim Reid-Pharr cleaves the terms. United structurally, black and queer are animated by different concerns: on the one hand, race understood through, and as, the logic of kinship and on the other sexuality as produced through the (il)logic of same-sex interracial desire. Paradoxically, the black family stands in as a metonym for race while fraught interracial desire produces the black queer, or, as Reid-Pharr provocatively puts it, “You say black gay. I hear nigger fag” (103). Historically, the term “nigger” was used not only to disenfranchise black individuals, but also as the ultimate way to mark their deracination. One left Africa belonging to an ethnic group and a family; one arrived in America a nigger. Similarly, when used in homophobic discourse, “fag” disembeds an individual from ostensibly heteronormative settings, marking one as an outsider, sexually deracinated. While both terms have been reclaimed for, arguably, progressive causes, as Reid-Pharr uses them, they invoke these histories of displacement and deracination. Conjoined, they mark the black queer’s exclusion from the domain of the black family and the race for which it is a metonym.

“Nigger fag” demonstrates the centrality of deracination to black queer identities and, in so doing, makes diaspora central to the emergence of black queer identities.[7] We are at some remove from Foucauldian-inspired paradigms in which individuals are queered through institutional discourses. If we foreground deracination—a deliberately diffuse term—we must attend to the various sexual and non-sexual discourses that deracinate black individuals, ranging from sexological and anthropological texts, to bills of sale and ownership and insurance documents. Although this manuscript does not attend to such a wide range of documents, I want to suggest the possible scope of this project, and its potential for bringing black queer studies into dialogue with a host of seemingly unrelated, indeed, non-humanist disciplines.

Rinaldo Walcott provocatively argues, “the diaspora by its very nature, its circumstances, is queer,” adding, “the territories and perambulations of diaspora circuits, identifications, and desires are queer in their making and their expressions” (97). Rather than accepting the proposition that diaspora is always already queer, we might specify how diaspora queers. Such a task might begin by showing how discourses of the black diaspora, and diaspora in general, arrest the deracinating, queer act of dissemination in the term “diaspora,” a term that refers to scattering or sowing, by foregrounding insemination and fertilization as the inevitable end-point of diaspora.[8] In contrast, Walcott would have us attend to the queer implications of scattering and sowing, the deracination that creates modern black and queer subjects. By making explicit the queer implications of historical diasporas, we simultaneously make visible the normalizing, genealogical imperatives in current scholarship on the diaspora. Whether scholars claim that a focus on diaspora maintains and preserves race or that it disrupts race through foregrounding hybridity, both approaches attach diaspora to hetero-futurity.

My goal in critiquing the genealogical imperative in diasporic scholarship is not to suggest that we can “move away” from such a foundation, for to do so would mean we jettison an entire body of work that has had profound and necessary social, cultural, and political effects. Unlike Lee Edelman, who asks that we accede to the impossible task of refusing the promise of politics, I am interested in retaining a notion of the political. My critique, then, is mainly methodological. How might a queer approach enable us to re-read the archives of diaspora? We might understand diaspora as a more antinomian formation, not dedicated solely to preserving and extending genealogy, but focused also on the innovative ways in which diaspora has engendered experimental modes of living and loving.

---

[1] Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976) 65. Subsequent citations in text.

[2] Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 218.

[3] Dwight A. McBride, “Straight Black Studies,” Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2004) 35-58. Subsequent citations from this volume in the text.

[4] Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,” Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 45.

[5] Rinaldo Walcott, “Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in Diaspora,” Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 91. Subsequent citations in text.

[6] Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man: Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2001) 82. Subsequent citations in text.

[7] It should be clear by now that the notion of a black queer identity exerts considerable pressure on the very notion of identity; it is used here catachrestically, as a convenient shorthand.

[8] In recent critical discourse, especially in the journal Diaspora, diaspora becomes wedded to hetero-futurity. See, for instance, William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1.1 (1991): 83-99. For an alternate, non-heteronormative paradigm of diaspora, see Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing 2003) 85-118.

Tins

Tins

At the edge of the lip
Where the cut meets the fold

At the fold of the grain
Where the lip tells a yarn

Where the seam meets the cut
There’s a story of a lip

Through the grain of the cut
As the story folds a seam

And the cut of the grain
Lets the fold spin a yarn

Photography: Andrew Njoroge
Poem: Keguro Macharia