Kwani? 05, Part 2, Editorial by Billy Kahora
The Fire Next Time
OR
A Half-Made Place: Between Tetra Paks and Plastic Bags
In Kenya, democracy is the growth in popularity of bad manners. Anonymous
About six months ago, I wrote an editorial to appear in the twin issues of Kwani 05, Part 1 and 2 (this issue). However, that editorial only ran in Part 1; I yanked it from this issue- Part 2, because what I had to say back then today feels jaded, naïve and foolish as is any attempt to capture public life in this country beyond the span of a few weeks. The certainties, ideas and chest-thumping of August 2008 are dust motes and vapours. I wake up to the Kenyan morning and look around, and the new day seems to forgive the recent past, mostly because the public life is one of amnesiac collusion, a physical fact without regret or hope. So I start again.
The two parts of Kwani? 05 are dedicated to our ‘troubles’. And it is exactly 11 months since the two principals of these ‘troubles’, PNU and ODM, signed a peace accord through President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga and ‘decided to work together’. In just a year, there has been a speedy re-make of the initial buddy movie that was Kenya Part 1- 2002: On The Road To Democracy. In quick succession, we have produced Kenya Part 2 – 2007: The Disaster Movie, then Kenya Part 2 ½ – 2009: The Epic Government Movie. Two buddies fall out in the first, have a showdown in the second and are now uneasy ‘comrades’ in an epic fight for peace against larger and more evil forces like justice. We await Kenya Part 3 – 2012: Apocalypse Now. If we are to believe rumour and innuendo, we are in trouble in 2012.
Democracy, the wags say, is not so much the practice of the people’s will but the successful political practice of the best players in a marketplace we call elections. A Kenyan fact for a while now has been the huge chasm between the will and call for change that leads people to the polls every five years, and our political realities, the practice of those players who are successful in the political game – our elected officials. But 2007 was something special. And yet the will of the masses of new voters in the ill-fated elections—if recent big issues like the Waki Commission, MPs’ salaries (to tax or not to tax), the Media Bill and that blast from the past, famine, coming right after the skyrocketing of the price of unga and a maize ‘scandal’ are anything to go by—will not have been realised The people’s will – if there is anything like it, apart from the less sanguine loot, slash and burn or, as someone aptly put it, “democracy is the growth in popularity of bad manners” – if we are to gauge from clamour and soundbite, is that the Waki Report should be fully implemented, MPs’ salaries should be reduced and taxed and that the media should be left alone. And that corruption has once again reared its ugly hydra head.
The above issues seem counter to the interests of the successful players in the game of politics, our elected officials, if their reaction is anything to follow. Even after the first 100 days of 2008, nothing has really changed. We are in Naipaul’s ‘half-made State’ – a ‘rhetorical commodity’ at best, consistently engaging in ‘fairy tales, fantasies, vapors and motes of dust, imported magic and borrowed images, metaphors, fantasies and applauded lies’, fairy tales that come together in prescriptive spaces such as The Kenya We Want. The Kenya We Live In is something that is never broached in public spaces. We are great masters at sleight of brain and idea. The politicians sell, and we, the saps, buy it. We get played by what I see as the smartest people in Kenya – the un-Tourists, the uber- Realists, the clown kings and princes in what Cameroonian political theorist and academic, Achille Mbembe, has described as a ‘strange carnival in which a pervasive atmosphere of macabre conviviality binds the potentate and the dominated in a drawn out orgy of violence and death’. We buy the idea of a prescriptive leadership rather than a descriptive one; talk about what we want as we skirt the real.
Rewind to April 2006. Day of National Prayer. A building collapses in Kenya, most likely because of the defective nature of building materials and bribes given out by the owners for the law to look the other way. Also, famine rocks North Eastern province, and floods once again wash over Western and Nyanza provinces – all this takes place not because of acts of God but poor planning and a lack of proper management in national food distribution. North Eastern province starves for weeks, ignored by the soundbites and the politicians’ speeches. A building collapses on River Road and almost the entire Parliament heads there in an afternoon.
Fast forward to 2008 – and not to take away anything from the sad losses of life in the Nakumatt and Molo oil tanker fires, but these incidents overshadow famine in Ukambani. And yet again the same soundbites. Selective choices.
An anecdote might be appropriate here.
Before we took to prayer back in 2005, one of the biggest worries in this country was the ubiquitous plastic bag. Described as the national flower, it sprouted everywhere. This seems hysterically laughable now in light of the negative ethnicity, crime and insecurity, famine and fire of the last couple of years. And so I went into Mathare, the second biggest slum in Nairobi, a space in which plastic bags sprouted everywhere like flowers, to observe this scourge for an environmental magazine.
My guide took me to a kiosk. We ordered some tea, and the proprietor asked whether I wanted garatathi—a plastic bag. The guide reacted to my puzzlement with a grin; in Mathare milk, he explained, comes in plastic bags and is so diluted with water that tea with very little milk was called garatathi. So I nodded, yes, tea with very little milk, like the English drink it, would suffice, and the proprietor walked outside, whistled and shouted ‘Njoki’!. She appeared carrying two clear plastic bags with very watery milk. The proprietor handed over some money.
I could not get over that image of milk in see-through plastic bags. These were the same bags that my environmental research told me took five million years to decompose. During my childhood, the milk truck, lorry ya maziwa, and the sound of crates spelled Order. Those morning sounds came with family breakfast, school uniforms, early morning traffic – a normal Kenyan morning. Order. Predictability. And of course, the milk packs came with a stamp of reassurance – fine print that stated that the milk had been pasteurised.
Seeing milk in clear plastic bags felt to me like the loss of all those things. The plastic bag milk had no licensed stamp, had clearly not been tested with a lactometer. When I thought of the years between milk in packets and plastic-bag milk, the years of predictability and order and the years of informality and chaos, I felt the sudden breakdown of things. I did not realize how lucky we had been even then, for places like Mathare that were so locked out of regular systems had not let their general anger show. But of course, watered-down milk in clear plastic bags is just a beginning; sooner or later such parallel universes, economies, lives, futures, realities and many other things trigger the actualisation of a people’s will—the fire this time. Diluted milk in clear plastic bags, open sewers, shit in plastic bags (flying toilets), all these give rise to a people’s will, or as others would have it, bad manners democracy the Kenyan way. And at some point, the breakdown since the calm and peace of Nyayo milk and a call for justice took over. And the rest is history.
Nairobi controls at least 45 per cent of our GDP, has roughly 3 million people, 2.1 million of whom live in Nairobi’s slums and so-called low income neighbourhoods. Kibera, Mathare and Korogocho; three of the largest slums in Nairobi. It is no coincidence that the greatest violence in the first 100 days of 2008 was witnessed in these three areas. Watching conflagrations in Mathare over the last few years, I suddenly recognised some of the places I’d been to back in 2005 and realised another thing was lost: the idea that this country is calm and peaceful. In a week, I now realised that we continue to irrevocably reach a place that is incomparably more disorderly than watery milk. But the scary thing is that public life continues, as if the first 100 days of 2008 never happened. And so we wait for the fire next time.
Enter the writer.
This issue, Kwani 05 Part 2: Revelation and Conversation continues where Part 1 left off; trying to explain how the fire began. In it are expressions on what, why, where, when, who and how it happened. But two events, one purely literary, the other literary but bigger than that, leave me less than elated, or at least with mixed feelings. The first is that I have been lucky enough to have been selected as a co-judge of the Commonwealth Regional Prize for Africa. I have over the last four months read a huge part (at least 70 books) of what has been published recently on the continent. There were only two entries from this region. Even as I ask where the defining texts that preceded what I am calling The Fire This Time are, and even as a letter from Marjorie Oludhe McGoye (in these pages) sets me straight on what has come before, I am not sure what is being attempted at the moment. But maybe the candidates for the Commonwealth Writers Prize are not an indicator of the non-production in this region. Perhaps only Nigerian and South African writers are interested in it; that in a single year South Africa can produce secondary books by Zukiswa Wanner, Mandla Langa and Sindiwe Magona that are eligible for the prize, and Nigeria can produce works by Ifeanyi Ajaegbo, Sefi Atta, and Toni Kani. Someone might say that I should consider the literary economies of scale; Nigeria and South Africa have different dynamics. Simple comparisons cannot be made. I would say that even if this region were allowed a special dispensation to enter books published within the last five years, we would be found wanting. Or they might say, of course, those books are being published – look at the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature, look at the entries for the last five years. My question is why these do not seem as incisive and full of expression, as defining as the candidates for the Commonwealth Prize are of their respective spaces. Are there even any defining texts for the present or for the future, let alone from the past? I am yet to read a work of which I can say: yes, this is a Nairobi, in all its plastic bag glory, these are the Nakuru, Kisumu and Mombasa that I recognise. The Commonwealth Writers Prize is full of such examples. And yes, not to be wholly dismissive, I would throw Ken Kamoche’s A Fragile Hope, John Sibi Okumu’s Role Play, Stanley Gazemba’s Stone Hills of Maragoli , all in there, as good as anything I’ve seen as a candidate for this year’s prize. But … I know writers who have lots of promise, whom I’ve known for more than five years, and I want to see things from them.
The other event is the publication of the wonderful, wonderful book by Michela Wrong, It’s Our Turn To Eat, her take on the contextual social and political space in which John Githongo found himself when he decided to bail. This is a work that reminds anyone who calls themselves a Kenyan writer what their business is and should be. To quote a writer friend’s reaction when she looked through it: ‘Many writers I know are carrying full dossiers, but they are too busy talking rather than writing’. More power to Ms Wrong for the book she’s written, but where are the other books? Hers takes Kenya on its own terms, and it sings. It encounters, analyses and concludes within a real framework that I recognise, goes beyond the ‘rhetorical commodity’ – and of course, we will be ‘talking’ about this book for years to come. That is its power, that it will create a whole slew of rhetorical commodities of and by itself. Another writer friend told me that throughout the three years she was writing her book, Kenyan writers were talking. I have no problem with talking. That’s what writers do; they need space to vent as they go back and forth from the word processors. I have no problem with prescriptive ideas, playing sap to the politician, imposing theories that might not have much to do with realities on the ground. But who is to say what is reality or what isn’t? All I might ask, starting with myself, is that my rhetoric, my theories, my musings–at least if I call myself a writer–can be seen between the pages of a book. That I am part of the defining texts of the here and now, and that they are written down and not just talked about. Because we really need them, as much as we need many other things, if we are to avoid, faint hope, the fire next time. And if we can’t avoid it – the moment has been defined for all to see.
