Bad Activist Women! Bad!

The Nancy Baraza-Rebecca Kerubo story dominated Kenyan minds prior to the ICC ruling that now consumes our time. I want to think about the context of the case against Deputy Chief Justice Baraza, more specifically, the role of women activists and the much-debated gender requirements of the constitution.

To give the quick and dirty, DCJ Baraza is accused of pinching Kerubo’s nose and, later, threatening to shoot Kerubo, who was trying to perform her duties as a security guard at one of Nairobi’s most exclusive malls, the Village Market. Baraza reportedly told Kerubo that she should “know [important] people” and, implicitly, not trouble them with the minutiae of mall security procedures.

Since the case broke, public comments on newspaper articles have highlighted Baraza’s status as an activist and reformer:

What an embarrassment to the women’s movement, FIDA, and women lawyers as a whole! Lady up madam and act with the decorum that deserves that office you hold!

Ms. Baraza, Power! Power!

Kenyans, it is now my pleasure to present to you the so-called reformers.

We are getting what we asked for. We have chosen to have radicals as our judges. We have chosen to have ‘born stubborns’ as our referees. We thought we could change them, but here we are. Once stubborn/radical, always one.

One more reason why I cannot vote for a woman to be president. It is not a male chauvinism but just an age old observance of African ladies who have power over their subjects. Sorry if I have hurt the feminists and the politically correct individuals.

The real issue as mentioned here is the quality of vetting for these jobs. All the plum jobs are going to members of a small “club” of civil society players whose main claim to fame is globe-trotting, Ivy league education and support for Western values especially gay rights. But these guys are untested in the real world of work. Worse, as in the case of Baraza and MM they are or are perceived to be arrogant and out of touch with “Wanjiku”.

Critics have blamed Baraza’s behavior on her gender. Murithi Mutiga, for instance, describes the courtly behavior of leading lawyer Pheroze Nowrojee when faced with a difficult situation to suggest that men know how to handle power. As he notes in an aside, “If it’s any consolation, though, at least [Baraza’s] boss [Willy Mutunga, the Chief Justice] is . . . one of the most easygoing judicial officials you will ever meet.”

We will be saved by our men—perhaps even by those accused of crimes against humanity.

It is worth remembering that the Kenyan parliament—or whoever is in charge of these things—has not yet come up with a formula for complying with the gender rules of the constitution—no more than 2/3 of seats shall be occupied by more than one gender, even as presidential appointments of ministers and senior leaders continue to ignore gendered considerations. In the meantime, Kenyan women continue to undergo scrutiny: newspaper and magazine articles continue to emphasize their natural roles as wives and mothers: wives and mothers are too busy to stretch their minds. And those who do are unnatural and have unhappy husbands or boyfriends. Week after week, the newspapers print yet another disciplinary column instructing women to act like women if they want to get and keep men.

Successful women are described as arrogant—DCJ Baraza is now, unfortunately, the poster child of the arrogant woman who cannot handle power. Many fingers have been wagging in versions of “bad woman, bad!” Others, “bad activist, bad!” Others, “bad reformer, bad!” And the lesson we are enjoined to learn is that women cannot handle power. Activists and reformers are hypocrites.

Women activists are the worst hypocrites!

Meanwhile, we have yet to ask persistent questions about class politics: what is alleged to have happened between Baraza and Kerubo represents quotidian interactions between Kenyan employers and employees. One need only walk into Nakumatt or Uchumi or Chandarana to see any number of wealthy women striding around followed by their uniformed maids pushing heavy carts or, at times, carrying the two light items that employers dare not deign to carry. It’s not uncommon to enter stores in town where employers openly insult employees. And domestic workers in Kenya are, to borrow Zora’s language, the “mules” of the world.

While I do not want to ignore the specificity of the Baraza-Kerubo interaction, I’m interested in how we might use it to frame and enable other discussions about labor practices and politics in Kenya. (I totally had no idea this post was going to head this direction—I thought I was writing something else. I’ve been thinking a lot about the occupy movement and how it might speak to Kenya, where our version of the 1% are comfortably situated within government positions or in near proximity to office holders.)

The conflation and condemnation of women-activists-reformers upholds the myth of a benevolent, gentlemanly patriarchy while obscuring substantive discussions of class privilege. Those who have critiqued DCJ Baraza’s “arrogance” have ignored class and labor and focused on gender and activism, that is, Baraza does not represent the moneyed elite to which she belongs, but, rather, women activists. (I’m splitting hairs for strategic reasons.)

DCJ Baraza is our contemporary Wangu wa Makeri, a leader who, in some versions of the story, got drunk on power and misbehaved in public. The lesson of Wangu wa Makeri, one taught in primary schools when I attended, is that women cannot be trusted with power. They will always misuse it.

In treating the Baraza-Kerubo case as a lesson in “when women misbehave” we ignore the very real conversations we need to be having about Kenya’s version of the 1%, who have thrived under Kibaki, and the many others who struggle to survive in a country that barely acknowledges they exist.

Silence in Audre Lorde

What do we want from each other
after we have told our stories.
–Audre Lorde, “There are no Honest Poems About Dead Women”

The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.
–Audre Lorde, “The Black Unicorn”

Audre Lorde’s poetry is infinitely quotable. While claimed for a largely confessional feminist tradition, Lorde reads more as a late modernist: hard-edged, crystalline, difficult. This unacknowledged difficulty reveals itself in the dearth of criticism on Lorde’s poetry. A lot has been written on Zami (though not enough); her essays are cited all the time; but her poetry remains neglected. Lorde will not let language turn into chant or slogan. In reading her poetry, one is forced to wrestle with the complications of breaking silence. Lorde is known, after all, for the slogan, “Your silence will not protect you.” Yet, her poetry suggests that breaking silence need not lead to liberation. Silence has a far richer life in Lorde, and breaking silence carries with it “the weight of hearing” (“Outlines”).

History is not kind to us
we restitch it with living
past memory forward
into desire
into the panic articulation
of want without having
or even the promise of getting. (“On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge”)

Lorde’s “want” unsettles me. A “panic articulation” of the unrealizable, it inhabits the neighborhood of failure, but a failure that we cannot do without. When I taught her work a year ago, I kept wondering what it meant to fail to read her, how to think through her impossible syntax, the race-queer-feminist labor of impossible syntax. It was easy to fall back onto discussions of queer ineffability, but even those did not quite work—they were too easy and not quite right, not embedded in the right histories. At the time, I told my students that Lorde’s readers had used her essays to explain away her poetry—we were going to try to inhabit its fractures and gaps, its hard lines. To understand how, for instance, “Coniagui women” feed their sons “yam soup / and silence” to turn them into “men.”

The difficult lessons of silence:

Harriet there was always somebody calling us crazy
or mean or stuck up or evil or black
or black
and we were
nappy girls quick as cuttlefish
scurrying for cover
trying to speak trying to speak
trying to speak
the pain in each others mouths
until we learned
on the edge of a lash
or a tongue
on the edge of the other’s betrayal
that respect
meant keeping our distance
in silence (“Harriet”)

Respect, and yet, to give that up, to abandon the “vanities of silence” to “war and weep” (“For Assata”). Even as,

When we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid (“A Litany for Survival”)

In retrospect, I was trying to teach about silence in Lorde. But how does one teach about silence? Or teach silence? And what is the value of silence in Lorde? We have been so insistent on breaking it, ignoring it, shelving it, silencing it, that we have risked missing it. Missing its awkward demands. But what are the demands of silence? What might it mean to inhabit its space-time?

This is too hard.
*

I am tired of holy deaths
of the ulcerous illuminations the cerebral accidents
the psychology of the oppressed
where mental health is the ability
to repress
knowledge of the world’s cruelty. (“Eulogy for Alvin Frost”)

I marked this up in my book; we read the poem in class; I could not talk about the part I’ve emphasized. Published in 1978, it felt much too raw to become part of a classroom conversation. Reading Lorde was too hard, exposing scars I thought long healed. One might talk about vulnerability in the classroom—but the psychic costs of it are unbearable. One manages. Somehow. And learns not to teach Lorde again.

One cannot anticipate the minefields of the classroom. For certain bodies—black, queer, foreign—the vulnerabilities embraced in U.S.-born professors rarely translate. The affective tax is too high, the ideological demands impossible, the experiment bound to fail. One remains professional, theoretical, detached, cold.
*
In the silence, one hears Lorde’s echoes. Listen.

Our labor
has become more important
than our silence.

Our labor has become
more important
than our silence. (“A Song for Many Movements”)

Labor is not “speech.” It can be. And Lorde’s echoes—there are so many of them. Who is being persuaded? What conditions enable the echo? What silences are needed by the echo?

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children. (“Power”)

*
I was looking for an argument about silence. But I find myself “rushing headlong / into new silence” (“Smelling the Wind”). Knowing (or believing) with Lorde,

There is a timbre of voice
that comes from not being heard
and knowing you are not being
heard noticed only
by others not heard
for the same reason. (“Echoes”)

*
That is not quite right. But I don’t know how to continue. Perhaps that is the lesson of silence.

Where are Kenya’s Leaders?

An update from the DN reads:

Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka at Eldoret North MP William Ruto Karen’s residence in Nairobi. He joins Ministers Samuel Poghisio, Ali Mwakwere and other Members of Parliament allied to the newly formed United Republican Party (URP) who have also converged at the residence. 12:56 pm.

Are any of our leaders at IDP camps? Or at sites where bodies were burned? Buried?

With the people (and the ghosts) this process is supposed to be about?

PEV Ghosts

We must put the ghosts of 2007/8 behind us.
–Uhuru Kenyatta

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
–T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

A skeletal hand scrabbles though the muck of forgetting. This year the maize tastes richer. Grazers seem more intelligent. They make terrified noises at night. The wind wails. We have yet to complete funeral rites. The ghosts are waiting.

I am seeking ghosts.

This is risky.

Ghosts lack clear memories, are outlets of emotion, repositories of bad affect. They do not know where to direct their anger. To the ghost, I am as culpable of murder as the hand that lifted the machete, set fire to the church, stood aside and watched.

It’s dangerous to face the anger of ghosts.

It’s even more dangerous to face the truths ghosts tell, “tongued with fire.”

Burning Kenya again.

Kenya.

Burning.

Raising the temperature on our perpetual simmer. Creating hot spots that cannot and will not be governed by police forces who were silent and absent and complicit in 2007/8. The sizzle of then.

From the right angle, a whiff of rotting flesh.
*
Tomorrow the ICC judges rule on something that is by now irrelevant: whether the so-called Ocampo Six will face trial. It is irrelevant because two of the six are running for president—they have supporters and machinery—and have said, boldly, that the ICC’s ruling will not affect their presidential aspirations. It is irrelevant because Kenya, in its treatment of Bashir and its actions during the ICC process, has signaled its willingness to shield the six on the grounds that the ICC is racist and anti-African. It is irrelevant because at least four of the six are so intimately connected with Kenyan power that their downfall threatens root structures we can only imagine. It is irrelevant because the creation of the six as six erased the dead and displaced. We started talking about the six and, as our leaders implored, we forgot about the rest. We forgot the Kenya of rotting flesh and focused on the Kenya of gleaming cars. We were dazzled. Distracted. Forgot why the ICC mattered. Ignored the haunting ghosts.

I am seeking haunting ghosts.

They frighten me.

I am not brave.

This must be done.
*
After Samuel’s death, King Saul consulted the Witch of Endor and asked her to raise Samuel’s ghost. On rising, Samuel asked, “Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?”

The ghosts I seek come in waves of anger and rage—angry they have been forgotten, angry they died too young, angry that I refuse to let them rest. And still I seek them. Need to seek them. Listen for them in winter winds. Taste them in Kenyan food.

I am seeking ghost raisers—mediums who will risk their sanity, witches who will risk their lives, artists who will face the darkness. Kenyans who will face the darkness.

Not with the certainty of “never again.” Not with the bravado of “next time we will be prepared.” Not with the anxiety of plane tickets in hand to escape. Not with the comfort of faith or family. Not with the habits of living through troubled times.

Open.

Open to the madness of ghosts.

Open to memories that should never be owned.

Open to the lingering cries of the dying.

Of those we once called ours.

Emmanuel Iduma on the Nigerian Revolution

Emmanuel is the force behind Saraba magazine–if you’re not reading it, start.

He has a wonderful series of posts on the Nigerian revolution.

Highly recommended.

Listening to African Queers

A few weeks ago, I broke a longstanding personal rule and left a comment on a mainstream, very popular, award-winning U.S. gay blog. A long string of comments by mostly gay men (if web identities count for anything) supported the U.K.’s decision to consider sexual rights in granting aid. Many of the commentators condemned not simply homophobia and transphobia in Africa, but African governments and African citizens, the former explicitly the latter implicitly. “My tax dollars should not fund homophobia,” was a typical comment.

Against these certainties about African governments and African citizens, I pointed out the wealth of blogs and articles by African queers on the state of sexuality and rights in Africa and suggested that it would make sense if those pronouncing on Africa engaged with these sources. I also directed readers to the recent statement produced by African queer activists and organizations about aid conditionality. (But also see David Kuria’s dissent from this statement.) My attempt to suggest that African voices are worth listening to was ignored for the most part by those who considered themselves to be, variously, authorities on Africa, authorities on gay rights, defenders of gay rights, and defenders of aid conditionality.

At this particular table, there was no room for an African guest.

And because such online encounters are more common than not, this particular African guest returned to his online conversations with fellow African queers, musing about the futility of conversations with queers in the Global North who already know too much, want to save Africans but don’t want to listen to Africans, and want to cling to the (imperial) illusion that the Global North leads the way in gay rights—one wants to point out that, at least legislatively, South Africa is way ahead of the U.S. But let me not cloud the issue with facts.

I recount what is by now a tedious, too-familiar story, and adopt the position of the African in this particular story rather disingenuously. I am, after all, as much a product of the Global North as I am of the Global South. In a few short years, I will have spent as much time in one space as I have in the other. My education, my frameworks, my labor are in the Global North. And I am, for many, an unlikely person to speak for Africans or even to speak as an African. I know all too well that were my English less fluent, were my manners more diffident, were I more reliant on the salvific goodness of helpful foreigners, I would be more palatable to certain kinds of philanthropists who want stories about the awfulness of Africa and the chance to save another African.

Alas: I read Fanon at a formative moment.

Following the U.K.’s example, the U.S. has bought into aid conditionality tied to so-called sexual rights. It’s not yet clear what this will mean. But it is worrying.

Multiple blog posts from the U.S. have celebrated this “victory” for gay rights, this assertion that gay rights are human rights, universal rights: the U.S. is now on board with gay activism.

I am not celebrating.

In fact, I am disheartened by what feels like myopic celebrations that confirm, or suggest, that what is at stake in such a decision has nothing to do with helping African queers and everything to do with domestic U.S. feeling and neo-imperial machinations. I have no problem with U.S. queers celebrating this decision as an advance for U.S queer struggles; but let’s not confuse the issue and claim this decision has anything to do with African queers. Or that African queers were in any way consulted—not that we need to be, of course: knights in shining armor rarely ask whether the maiden and the dragon are engaged in an inter-species romance.

I am not suggesting that some African queers might not support aid conditionality. I am suggesting that such decisions can often accomplish more harm than good. While I am not interested in repeating tedious blather that Africans are “communal” while “westerners” are “individualistic,” I do want to emphasize that we all live deeply embedded lives. Aid conditionality based on sexual rights, and, really, gay rights, risks marginalizing the many kin-based, friend-based, and neighborhood-based networks inhabited by African queers. For the most part, African queers do not live in gay enclaves: cutting off major arteries to save tiny capillaries does not work. It simply cannot work.

More to the point, and to repeat something I’ve written before: positioning African queers as economic threats or as economic competition to other local, regional, and national projects renders us more vulnerable. In a country like Kenya where money is King, telling government agencies that money will not show up for a government project because queers are not treated well will most probably not result in better legislation or, more practically, better living conditions for queers. (Given Kenya’s strategic importance in the region and that we are happily killing Somalis for the Americans, I think our aid is safe.)

I realize that aid conditionality often has nothing to do with those populations deemed to be at risk. Or, rather, is based on information provided by “experts” who have “conducted studies” to “determine what is needed” and rarely, if ever, takes into consideration local needs and local situations, except as these are filtered through really fucked up lenses. I have sat through multiple presentations where so-called “experts” diagnosed Africans—yes, such collective terms are used too often—and heard myself described in ways I found utterly bewildering, reduced to a helpless, clueless child. When one speaks up at such meetings, one is told that one is an exception; no doubt, my U.S. education helped me grow toward civilization.

These too-frequent encounters (and once a year is too frequent for my taste) cost too much psychically for me to engage them. Thus, I skip most Africa-focused forums advertised in DC and most talks advertised by “well-known” Africanists—these are, strangely, also in short supply.

After all, how can I remain a happy African when others are so determined to infuriate me?

Who is listening to African queers? Who is listening to those who traverse local and international spaces, who understand local needs not because they spent 2 weeks on a grant-funded trip, but because they receive phone calls at 3 in the morning and spend countless hours making sure that queers find safe housing? Who is listening to those who through years of activism and study have developed methods for how to engage with political leaders?

Are efforts to save African queers ever really about African queers?

Medical Emergencies

The Kenyan education system considers medical doctors, including dentists and pharmacists, to be our best and brightest. In our competitive—and elite-making—public education system, medical doctors are the cherry on top, the prize, those who have proved themselves worthy. Medicine is not considered a vocation; I write this understanding how the term “vocation” can be misused to obfuscate important questions of labor and compensation. To be a medical doctor is to have achieved a dream—to have received a crown. These days, a paper crown.

Kenyan doctors are on strike.

Rather, Kenyan doctors who work in the public sector, in government hospitals, are on strike.

They are on strike because they do not have the equipment, facilities, and supplies to perform their jobs. They lack drugs and bandages and clean needles and sterilizers; they lack dialysis and MRI machines; they lack adequate medical insurance to keep themselves healthy; and they lack adequate compensation that values their contributions to Kenya. Indeed, to stretch a metaphor: the government has equipped Kenya’s doctors, the best and brightest, with First Aid boxes and told them to heal the nation.

And so our doctors are dying because they lack access to medical care and Kenyans who rely on public hospitals are dying because the doctors do not have the facilities to treat them.

Meanwhile, the Kenya government is twiddling its thumbs and buying expensive chairs (each Kshs 200,000, approximately $2,000). And saying, perhaps rightly, that there is “no money.” We are fighting a war so there is “no money.” Even as we set up more and more and more expensive “very necessary” committees to run the country.

If nothing else, the weeks of the PEV violence proved that Kenyan politicians are mostly indifferent to ordinary suffering. We killed each other as our leaders played “who has the biggest dick.”

More to the point: Kenyan politicians and their cronies do not need public hospitals and the doctors who work in them. Kenya has very nice, very expensive private hospitals, for those who care to be treated here. If not, South Africa, India, the U.S., the U.K. For those with money, public hospitals are a rumor. A place where one’s domestic servants might go if they require care.

As doctors strike to improve public healthcare, those of us who rely on private healthcare blithely move on with our lives. There is no crisis. Nothing to see here. And if doctors choose to strike, if our best and brightest try to argue for a more ethical, more humane medical environment, well, clearly, they did not get the memo: in our new era, “best and brightest,” “medical school degree,” “public health,” these are all nice phrases to be used in polite company and when we solicit money from donors.

The promise of the “best and brightest” has always been that they will provide the leadership we need to “improve” the country. Even as our history demonstrates that we would rather treat the “best and brightest” as unpaid or poorly paid laborers, people who work because they believe in “sacrifice.” That is our benign history. We also like sending them to jail and into exile.

What we forget—what the government forgets—is that Kenyan doctors in the public sector have chosen to work for Kenya. They could go abroad, seek other opportunities, leave our already depleted medical services even more depleted. We have, I believe, 2,300 public medical doctors for a population of 40 million. More eloquent writers can say more about the medical situation.
*
This medical situation raises an ongoing question about what it means to work in Kenya’s public sector. And, more specifically, why it is that the people I have long admired as the “best and brightest” do not work for the public sector. I wonder, also, why average people like me do not work for the public sector. What does it mean to envision public sector jobs as sites of intense, ongoing struggles to survive, let alone thrive? What does that struggle mean for Kenyan academics? And why do we expect academics and public sector workers to “sacrifice”?

“Sacrifice” becomes more than metaphor when patients and doctors are dying because they lack adequate supplies.

It’s not clear to me why the government would praise education and laud those who are well educated—as it does—only to ignore their needs and recommendations. Why should it be “unrealistic” for the government to ensure that public hospitals have adequate supplies? This at a point when, if Raila Odinga’s figures are to be believed, Kenya is spending 200 million a day to fight a needless war.

And what happens when the “best and brightest” and the “average and lucky” choose to leave public service and work elsewhere? I am not arguing that the public sector is the only place from which one can work for Kenya; I am interested, however, in what happens when the public sector becomes an impossible space for the “best and brightest” and the “average and lucky.”

What happens when the designation “best and brightest” is rendered meaningless by government action and inaction? How might this reverberate through an education system that is already in a state of crisis? What might it mean to devalue what is considered the pinnacle of academic achievement in Kenya? And what might it mean to tell those who want to dedicate themselves to public service that their education, their achievements, and their labor has no value?

Many messages are being sent by the government: messages about the value of education, about the value of public service, about the value of human life. None of these messages are the least bit encouraging.

At War?

Despite the guards who routinely search us as we enter Sarit Centre, Yaya, Westgate, but not Junction (curious, that), these being high-end shopping places, and despite nervous titters about bombs and terrorists, Nairobi feels indifferent to the war. Mainstream newspapers barely cover it—a recent article in the DN, treats an excursion into the “Somalia jungle” as an experiment in camping. Even though Somalia is “next door,” reports from the war are scarce and truncated, and none are available from independent, non-government-sanctioned sources. We hear very little about Somalis in Somalia, whose “hearts and minds” we have already won—our U.S. accents grate. And, by now, it has become common to use Al Shabaab to name those who, in U.S. parlance, might be termed “enemy combatants.” Much like our trigger-happy police who shoot first and ask questions later, our police who are unable or unwilling to distinguish between real threats and their (perverse) desires to stage extra-judicial executions, Kenya’s armed forces report stories of bodies, always deemed Al Shabaab, always culpable. We have no way of verifying what is happening.

Worse, we don’t seem to care.

It’s not clear to me that there’s space for dissent or reflection. I remain struck by the many who recognize the illegality and immorality of U.S. actions across the world, but are willing, too-willing, to give Kenya a pass. Those of us opposed to the war, no matter our grounds, are dismissed as too-soft liberals—a friend invokes “yoga” to dismiss my arguments, yoga, that ultimate marker of soft liberals.

We cannot spare a thought for “over there” because we are dealing with our own crises over here.

The inflation rate continues to climb; my banker tells me that bank interest rates on loans will probably hit 40-50%, perhaps slight hyperbole, but they are at an average of 24% now. Symptomatically, an article in the DN purporting to tell us how to manage an impossibly expensive Christmas had no advice to offer. Fuel prices continue to rise—I suspect fuel companies will have the “best year ever,” as did U.S. companies when gas hit $4 a gallon. There are shortages of cooking gas. The executive is in a prolonged, unrelenting war with the judiciary. We are still waiting to find out whether the so-called Ocampo Six will be charged by the ICC, even as the executive attempts to wriggle out of its obligations under the Rome Statute. While there is no Kenyan dream equivalent to the U.S. dream, the possibility of owning land and building a home carries a lot of weight, and now we are learning, or confirming, that the corruption by land officials in Kenya is so massive that, quite possibly, few of the many land transactions carried out over the past many years are valid.

Kenya is messy.

And at war.

Concerned with our abilities to “survive,” and still in a mode where, to use Lauren Berlant’s language, we misrecognize survival as freedom, we remain unconcerned by what happens “out there.” Or, more precisely, we want results from out there: body counts, towns captured, success. Anything but something else to trouble our minds. We do not have space or time for mental reflection. We do not have space or time for moral questions. We do not have space or time for ethical questions. Questions are “details.” And we would prefer not to deal with “details.”

But the war is not simply out there.

We continue to demolish houses, to render Kenyans homeless, and to argue that we are doing so to uphold the law. We continue to act unthinkingly, only to turn around and wonder why men with names like “Onyango,” “Kamau,” “Mutua,” and “Wekesa” are being “radicalized” by Al Shabaab. We are urged to be patriotic—striking workers and those threatening to strike have been urged to be “patriotic” and to consider that we are at war, so there’s no “extra money”—but shown that loyalty to Kenya and public service have no value to those in power. I hesitate to use the language of relationships: but we are in one hell of an abusive mess. Although the equivalent of Kenya’s 1% continue to thrive and to reap massive profits, just as they did under Kenyatta and Moi, it’s difficult not to feel familiar pains returning: the bile and acid that characterized the Kenyatta and Moi eras are once again working on barely-healed ulcers.

We have accepted too readily and too easily and too conveniently that we are at war. We continue to act as though war is a necessary abstraction that will secure our borders and, through some magical act, heal our economic and cultural and social fractures. To some extent it has. We are Kenyans united in war. Our Kenyan-ness is sutured by this war—by our rage, our anger, our indifference, our apathy. The color of the sutures is varied, but it is trying to sew together a Kenya even as that Kenya splits along multiple lines.

Arguably, nowhere is this splitting more evident than in ongoing debates around the new constitution. At its promulgation, Muthoni Wanyeki warned that it would be attacked, that those in power would attempt to defang it. And, indeed, on the very day of its promulgation, the constitution was deemed irrelevant as we hosted President Bashir. Under our obligations to the Rome Statute, we should have arrested Bashir. We didn’t. Since then, we have learned that the gender provisions in the constitution cannot be implemented; the election date in the constitution cannot be followed; the continuing extra-judicial executions against young Kenyan men in slums have demonstrated that nice-sounding phrases about equality and due process are worthless; the cults of personality around Uhuru, Ruto, and Raila suggest that we might as well give up on the idea of elections that are in any way free and fair; the immense corruption underway as politicians gear up for the next election cycle does not augur well for us. And still we have IDPs. Or, as I prefer to call them, Internally Displaced Kenyans, whose numbers increase with each new demolition.

Given everything that is happening in Kenya, it is tempting to dismiss the war as unimportant. Tempting to get caught up in the details of how to survive, not thrive. Tempting to say that what is immediate and familiar is urgent. What will we do should doctors go on strike? Against such an urgency, how can we care about what happens in already and always “lawless” Somalia?

Indeed, since our military has already won “hearts and minds,” we can rest easy about the war and focus on our own country. Better, we can celebrate when we get news of our massive victories out there. We are winning. We will crush Al Shabaab. We will prove that Kenyans are winners: we can kill just as well as the next country. And we can secure our borders. By which we mean, we can protect our tourist industry, that wonderful revenue earner that is anchored in racism and sexual exploitation. Yes, we really need to secure our borders for tourism.

We are at war.

Somehow, it does not seem to matter.

World AIDS Day & Rape

A friend tells me that 50% of schoolgirls in a local primary school have been raped. That is, girls aged from 6-14. Elsewhere, it’s 70% of the girls. I’ve yet to find numbers on the boys. Of the over 5,000 cases still to be tried from Kenya’s Post-Election Violence in 2007-8, not a single one focuses on rape. Rape does not exist as a political crime in Kenya. Nor is it considered a crime of ethnic violence.

World AIDS Day intersects with 16 Days Against Gender Violence, which runs from November 25 to December 10, Human Rights Day. Day-Days-Day. Something about this triad gives me pause. I am struck by the ostensible optimism of day as opposed to night—the sense of revelation, of light, of comfort. And also the controlled duration of “day,” especially here in the tropics where time divides neatly into 12 hours of day and 12 of night. It is a needed optimism.

Time bleeds during prolonged gender violence. Many of these girls are raped as they walk home from school, during the day. Others, and perhaps the same ones, as they try to live—to perform chores outside, to use external toilets, to visit friends. At night and during the day. The distinction we’d like to offer, the hope that “day” provides relief from “night,” feels much too elusive. Is, in fact, much too elusive. Time extends and fractures in ways we can neither map nor comprehend when we experience violence.

Now is always much too long.

What is World AIDS Day for those whose rape by familiars and intimates is habitual, even expected? Does World AIDS Day name an inevitable future? A still-unknown present?

The theme for this year’s 16 Days Against Gender Violence is From Peace in the Home to Peace in the World: Let’s Challenge Militarism and End Violence Against Women! This theme should remind Kenyans of the intimate connection among domestic, national, and international violence, streams that loop into and reinforce each other. It should remind us that we do a terrible job of protecting those we deem most vulnerable. It should also remind us about those not deemed important enough to be deemed vulnerable, those whose rapes we deem inevitable.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s article for World AIDS Day notes the high prevalence of infection among the young, stating, “HIV prevalence among girls aged 15-19 years is six times that of men in the same age group.” He argues,

Overall, our young population remains exceedingly vulnerable, regardless of gender. Today, over 60 per cent of new HIV infections are among young people aged 15 to 35 years.

What these statistics show is that we still have a huge challenge protecting our female citizens and our youth from HIV.

This prevalence is worsened by the fact that the informal sector, which produces 25 per cent of Kenya’s Gross Domestic Product, and where the youth form the majority, is loosely coordinated when it comes to HIV prevention, care and treatment.

This sector does not have the workplace HIV programmes available to those in formal employment. The nature of the work in this sector means the entrepreneurs and workers are often hard to reach. They thus miss out on educational and health interventions on HIV-Aids.

Taken together, pediatric infections, high HIV-Aids prevalence among women, girls, youth and problems of providing care to those in the informal sector means we are far from being safe from the ravages of the disease.

By targeting women, youth and the informal sector, HIV-Aids continue to manifest a capacity to wreak havoc on our economy by crippling our most active population and sector. (my emphasis)

What does it mean to render HIV/AIDS agential? What does it mean to view those in economically precarious situations, note the numbers of high infections among them, and then worry that HIV/AIDS weakens the country’s economic potential? What is erased in this elaborate shuffling of cards?

No doubt there are many answers.

Here’s one: the girls aged 6-14 who are raped as they walk to and from school. The girls 6-14 who are raped when they go home, as they run errands, as they play with friends. The girls 6-14 who learn to accept rape as a form of social protection. The girls 6-14 who develop into the young women aged 15-19 with incredibly high rates of HIV/AIDS.

Rape is not inevitable.

HIV/AIDS is not inevitable.

Friends Forever

I am well aware that I could not do justice to the subject without offending those “professional friends of the African” who are prepared to maintain their friendship for eternity as a sacred duty, provided only that the African will continue to play the part of an ignorant savage so that they can monopolise the office of interpreting his mind and speaking for him. To such people, an African who writes [or thinks] is encroaching on their preserves. He is a rabbit turned poacher.—Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (1938)

I want you to understand, sir, I am one of the best friends the Negro has in Lyon—Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

Africans have many friends.

I am often amazed by how many friends we have. Friends who multiply, especially when they learn about the multiple oppressions we face. Friends who launch campaigns, write letters, donate things we really need, including underwear and textbooks written in the 1940s, because every little bit helps.

Every little bit helps.

Our friends like to smooth our way. Aware that Africans are bashful, they write our documents for us, write and edit our speeches, adopt and present our petitions to those in power, and facilitate all the little transactions we cannot, because we are bashful.

We blush in gratitude.

And because they really care, they are willing to handle all those things we cannot, including financial things. Africans are intuitive and love music and cannot handle math or money. Haven’t you heard about the African farmer who planted coins and waited for a tree to sprout?

Yes, our friends are very helpful. We could not exist without our friends.

Even Fanon says so: “Willy-nilly, the Negro has to wear the livery that the white man has sewed for him” (Black Skin). Because our friends are kind and generous, the livery will be sewn to accommodate all those African extras—the buttocks, the genitals, the breasts, you know. Space enough for the African to breathe.

But then Fanon is not very generous. He does not appreciate the friendliness of those who are friendly: “We shall have no mercy for the former governors, the former missionaries. To us, the man who adores the Negro is as ‘sick’ as the man who abominates him” (Black Skins). I am not as ungenerous as Fanon. I appreciate our friends. We appreciate our friends.

In fact, we appreciate our friends so much that when we hold meetings and forums, we are excited when they monopolize these spaces with their ideas and visions and expertise. And we don’t even mind fetching water when they get thirsty. And we are even more grateful when they bring along their friends who monopolize question time. We are so grateful to learn from them.

What would we do without our friends?

Friends are friends forever!

We are happy that our friends want to save us. We are delighted that they translate our statements so that others can understand them. Regrettably, we have not yet learned to write or speak in ways that make sense to anyone else: our translators are our very best friends. We are very grateful.

And because our friends want only what is best for us, we should have no problems assenting to their plans. After all, they have been doing this for a very long time and we are still underdeveloped. If we want to be like them, we should listen to them, or so they say.

As Fanon says, “The black man wants to be like the white man. For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white” (Black Skins). Fanon is too harsh, I think. Surely our friends do not think like this. They want us to be developed, like them, not white! Simply free and developed. In fact, one day we will be so developed, our gay people will be free to wear leather chaps bare-assed in the middle of Moi Avenue. On that day, we will know we are truly free.

Until the day we can be as developed and free as our friends, we will never be truly free. Or so our friends keep telling us. Until then, our friends will continue to fight for us, to talk for us, to write for us, to use our stories, to show pictures of our faces, to create scholarships and awards in our names, to create petitions for us, to translate our lives for important people.

Our friends will never abandon us.

We are in this together.

For good.