The crazy things academics do for money

The night view of downtown Las Vegas in the US. The city is famous for its casinos, fine dining, and sex tourism. Photo/EVAN MWANGI

What you need to know:

  • Our writer went to Las Vegas, USA, hoping that all he did and said shall remain in Las Vegas but found so much temptation that he filed this provocative article

Although I am not clever enough to be a scholar of difficult topics like modernism, I was in Las Vegas, USA, the other day for a conference on ‘Modernism and Spectacle.’ 

In the Kenyan academy, it is blasphemous to utter the word ‘modernist’ in the same breath with ‘African.’ The two don’t mix. We prefer the devil we know: realism. We don’t like works whose experiments with language distort reality the way we know it, a common trick in modernist writing.

A patriot to the bone, I feel a bit like a prostitute now that the conference is over. I hope everything I did and said in Las Vegas shall remain in Las Vegas. 

I went to the annual Modernism Studies Association conference this year not because I care a hoot about modernism. Rather, it is because some good friends of mine invited me to speak about African literature and modernism, for 20 minutes.   

If I had checked the venue of the conference before accepting the invitation, I probably would have accepted sooner than I did — just out of the kind of curiosity that killed the African cat abroad.

Dubbed the “Sin City”, Las Vegas is famous for its casinos, fine dining, and (cough, cough) sex tourism. It is the ultimate adult playground. 

At the conference, you could notice from a distance that I didn’t belong in this modernism stuff. I registered for the event in the eleventh hour, so I didn’t get a programme, a T-shirt, or a tote bag like the other important attendees.

Adult playground

I am sure I looked lost most of the time, dazed. I didn’t follow the nuances in many of the hair-splitting debates about “singular”, “real”, “peripheral”, “fake”, “alternative”, “queer”, “global”, “high”, and “other” modernisms.
The Kenyan scholar Keguro Macharia was kind enough to allow me into a seminar he had organised to discuss modernism and anti-colonial struggles.  

At least in Prof Macharia’s seminar, I heard a few names I’d come across before — the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Nigerians Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, and Amos Tutuola, and the Caribbean writers V.S.  Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, and Vic Reid as artists who have used the modernist tradition to undermine colonial aesthetics. 

I also listened to Prof Peter Kalliney of the University of Kentucky talk about how during the Cold War, the CIA would use NGOs like the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom to sponsor African writing.

Such literary and publishing luminaries as Wole Soyinka, Es’kia Mphahlele, and Rajat Neogy received money from the CIA without knowing the unholy sources of the funding.

Even the much-vaunted 1962 Makerere conference of “African writers of the English Expression,” which drew writers like our Ngugi, Grace Ogot, and Rebeka Njau, was covertly sponsored by the CIA. 

Once in a while, the unwitting CIA beneficiaries would bring out a leftist publication such as the Mbari Society’s publication of Alex la Guma’s A Walk in the Night (1962).  But the American spy agency tended to favour the much less politically inflected modernist art for art’s sake, which Achebe once described as “deodorised dog-shit”.

When he won the Nobel Prize in 1986, Soyinka’s Nigerian detractors claimed that he had received money from the CIA. But it turned out that almost all the writers they praised vis-à-vis Soyinka had been subsidised by the CIA in some way.

Admitting that CIA money had “percolated” into the African literary scene as in other parts of society, Soyinka talks in a 1974 interview with John Agetua about a “boon friend” of his who had sworn that he had seen Soyinka’s CIA identity card. “I am sorry for the CIA if they thought they had gained anything,” says Soyinka.

As I thought about NGOs and media outlets that served as CIA’s whores and concubines in the 1960s, I’d mumble to myself: “Could someone evil be behind the explosion of trash we are reading today as ‘contemporary’ African writing being churned out by donor-supported NGOs and given awards left, right, and centre?”

But I am digressing. At the modernism conference, I tried to get into a seminar where they were discussing my favourite book, T.S. Eliot’s 434-line modernist poem, The Waste Land (1922). I was kicked out with such vehemence a shiver still runs down my spine and my bowels nearly open whenever I remember the incident.

There were many empty seats, but I think the conversation was closed to people who didn’t look intelligent. I grumbled as I walked out: Maybe “high” modernism is, after all, the many bad things its African enemies have accused it to be. 

While recoiling to my hotel room with the bowels still in a riot, I was fortunate to meet the respected deconstructionist, Joseph Hillis Miller, Jr in the lift. Addressing me as a “young man”, the 1928-born scholar looked so genuinely happy that I had “bought some books.”

Prof J. Hillis Miller has been my idol since I read his work on Eliot as an undergraduate at the University of Nairobi. I certainly didn’t tell him that I bought the books to go read in bed because some scholars of “the modern” had kicked me out of a discussion on Eliot.  

Although modernism is not my cup of tea, I sure enough enjoyed the spectacle in the Sin City.  A sexy female voice on the public address system in the hotel where I was staying kept coquettishly enticing you to go out and “prove to the world that you are still a sinner.”

From the airport to your bedroom, there were poker machines dotting your path, winking at you to try some gambling.

Prostitution is legal in some parts of Las Vegas, and sassy women paraded themselves on the streets offering “specials,” performing a pantomime of what looked like Nonini’s Wee Kamu.

There was also this black guy who looked Kenyan with a placard that read: “V.I.P. admission.” I shuddered to imagine where the admission was to. Las Vegas is Koinange Street, a million times over. 

It is while walking along the South Las Vegas Boulevard fighting the temptation to try out one of the specials that I bumped into an old Brazilian friend of mine, the ebullient Diego da Silvano. 

A budding literary critic when I last met him, Diego was now wearing a red T-shirt bearing the inscription “Girls, Girls, Girls”. The T-shirt had on it the figure of a girl standing in what in Nairobi would be called a “bend-over” position. There was also a number to call the girl on and take advantage of the specials.

Diego was handing out small card flyers with pictures of nude girls. He would shuffle them like poker cards, slapping them on his hand before giving them to passers-by. He had learnt to play dice with women and vulnerable men.

He targeted racial minorities like me. That’s why I came so easily under his radar. The girls were mainly immigrants from South America and the Caribbean.

Surprisingly, Diego invited me for lunch. As you probably know, it is hard for anybody to buy you anything in America, but wherever two or three Third World immigrants are gathered, big burgers shall be eaten.

While halfway through our triple cheese whoppers, Diego accused me of being a prostitute of sorts. I’m not only the guy you call when you want an African book to read in bed, I also left Kenya to teach in the US primarily because the US academy pays better.

He said during the few years I’ve been in America, I have learnt to be an expensive academic whore. I don’t go to conferences unless there is a speaking fee for me — a minimum of $10,000 (Sh820,000) for 20 minutes.  

I didn’t respond to the charges. He doesn’t seem to know that to make ends meet in Kenya, I would probably be working on the sly for one of my tribesmen running for president, penning editorials in his defence although in my heart of hearts I know the guy is headed into limbo.

If you can swing it, please read the confidential reports on tribal clashes and post-election violence, and you will be shocked to see the literary critics and university professors who feature there as hate-mongers and suppliers of bows and arrows. Others have even embezzled money set aside for IDPs. My name would probably be among them.

Before you cast the first stone, remember that scholars who have studied images of the prostitute in African literature, such as Tanzania’s F.E.M.K. Senkoro, have argued for sensitive representations of the people who eke a living from the oldest profession. You should celebrate our struggles against the moneybags we smooch and cuddle. 

That’s what Ngugi and Sembene Ousmane have done in their best works, presenting the African prostitute as a strong woman fighting for the rights of the minority. 

While male writers have presented the female prostitute as a degenerate figure who symbolises all that has gone awry with the post-colonial state, women artists like Buchi Emecheta, Monica Genya, and Flora Nwapa have highlighted the commercial sex worker’s subversive potential.

It is only recently that African writers have presented the plight of male prostitutes in novels such as K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Thirteen Cents. One day, I hope to write a bare-it-all newspaper article about the plight of expensive academic whores.