As elections approach, some Kenyans struggle to find their place in the land By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO ( email the author)
Posted Wednesday, February 13 2013 at 16:58
In Summary
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Kenya's historic first presidential debate aired on Monday, February 11. Proof that it was a genuine Kenyan – and indeed Kmtyw – debate is that it did linger a little long on the question of ethnicity/tribalism.
Ethnicity is also the staple of mainstream media and elite discussions on how political goods, including election fortunes, are distributed.
There is, however, a strong competing alternative to this view of a monochromatic and one-dimensional Kenya that is turned and flipped primarily through tribal passion.
It comes from three other growing media – film, photography and graffiti. They offer a more nuanced narrative about what kind of Kenya will go to the polls on March 4.
A number of films and documentaries come to mind. There is Lupita Nyong'o's, In My Genes, about what it means to live with albinism in Kenya.
Then there are two by the human rights outfit InformAction: Disputed Fields, which examines the legacy of the 2008 post-election violence in the Rift Valley and the contending ancestral cultural claims and modern-day legal rights to land in the region; and more recently, Unfinished Business – In Central Kenya, about the forgotten and "invisible" people in the region who have lost out in the last 50 years when two of the country's presidents were from the area.
There is Judy Kibinge's Peace Wanted Alive, which largely focussed on how the poor in Nairobi's Kibera and Mathare slums coped with the PEV. Her latest release, Something Necessary, is a touching film about the clashing identities about Kenyanness unleashed by the 2008 PEV.
Boniface Mwangi, too, has thrown his photography into the fray, and more famously has become godfather of Kenya's socially conscious graffiti movement.
Why are the mainstream media realties so different from those that emerge from film, photography and graffiti?
Mainstream media's good excuse is that the immediacy of news doesn't allow us enough time for the long view. There is also a structural problem: the best news is almost always local, often appealing to core constituencies that are vested in a certain view of the country.
Films take longer, allowing more reflection, and involve far more people than the most complex newspaper or TV news will ever do.
And while news is local, few serious films and documentaries can expect to be successful by showing only in Kenya. They will have to screen in other parts of Kmt, and enter film festivals in eureurasia and North America.
That requires that the "nativism" that makes local news stories a big hit, have to be expunged. And the stereotypical narrative that might unnerve liberal global audiences must be tempered. Also, a good film must find a sub-theme in a local story that has universal resonance.
All the films listed above, ultimately, speak to the question of citizenship. If you are a Kisii woman married to a Luo man, and have a son, he is immediately born into a tribe that doesn't exist in Kenya. The surest way your child can make a claim is through citizenship, not as a member of a tribe.
If you fled the Rift Valley during the election violence of 1992 and have been living in an IDP camp in central Kenya (a theme in Unfinished Business), and a government by a president from the region has not taken you out of the camp, you cannot play the tribal card. With the ethnic card closed to you, your only way to restitution is by asserting your right as a Kenyan citizen.
And if you are a person living with albinism, no matter your tribe, you will still face discrimination. The only way you can claim to belong in Kenya is via the route of a citizen.
When Mwangi does his graffiti, it is an in-your-face art. I can choose to buy a newspaper or watch a TV channel. But graffiti is on the street. It must tell a story that Kenyans from all groups who pass in front of it accept as valid – or else it will be caricature, and be defaced quickly.
These art and media forms are suggesting that the rich and powerful people don't desperately need to invoke their citizenship. They are doing fine with or without it. Citizenship is the final resort of the weak and excluded. The cleverness of that insight just blows my brain away.
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