What Lupita, Binyavanga and soccer star Wanyama have done for Kenya

So the lovely Lupita Nyong’o brought home Kenya’s first, and one of Africa’s few, Oscar awards for her role in the film, 12 Years a Slave. Seems the world can’t get enough of Lupita.

To begin to understand the real meaning of Lupita’s prize, it is worth noting that her father, Senator Anyang’ Nyong’o (and mother Dorothy, no doubt) was in the house to watch his daughter receive her gong.

The good Prof Nyong’o, former secretary-general of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement, flew to the US virtually straight from the party’s shambolic elections at Kasarani Stadium.

The difference between the scenes that the good Senator left behind him in the Kasarani hall, and the crowning of his daughter at Hollywood & Highland Centre theatre was as different as Earth and Mars. And it is that difference that leads us to something about Lupita’s Oscar that is worthy exploring.

For people not to see a country in a linear stereotypical way – in Kenya’s case as another typical ethnically divided land and corrupt African state – its citizens need to crawl out from under the rock and force a different narrative about it.

For many years, colourful athletes like the cocky world-beating steeple-chaser Ezekiel Kemboi, and the more regal 800-metre world champion David Rudisha, to name a few, represented the “other Kenya”. The Kenya of a people who, independent of the state and out of sheer individual determination, take on the world’s best and beat them.

THE AFRICAN BUSH

Soon, however, Kenya’s runners became as clichéd as the Maasai with beads or red blanket in tourism adverts and postcards. Could Kenyans do anything else, many started to ask?

Well, they could . . . kick ball. So Macdonald Mariga went to play for Inter Milan, but the footballer who has really captured the imagination is Victor Wanyama, who plays for English Premier League side Southampton.

Football is no different from a marathon or steeple-chase, you might say, it is all sport. It’s not, but for different reasons than you would think.

Take the example of Uganda’s John Akii-Bua, who broke the 400 metres-hurdles world record to win gold in the 1972 Munich Olympics. Decades later, Akii-Bua remains the only native African to have won the 400-metre hurdles gold.

In explaining Akii-Bua’s feat, many in the international press claimed that he got so good at the hurdles because he spent his childhood running away from leopards in the “African bush”.

There is always the suggestion that Africans who are excellent at long distance races became good while running for their dear lives from wild animals or, like Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie, because they were from poor families in remote villages and had to run long distances to find a school. In other words, they became good because of desperation, not training.

Football, though, is different. Acting even more so. It has therefore been a good few months for Kenya. Writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s new novel, Dust, is receiving global acclaim.

Like being able to act to Oscar-winning level, you don’t get inspiration for noteworthy writing through climbing high trees fleeing lions in the jungle.

MORE OPEN SOCIETY

Then a few weeks ago, another Kenyan writer, Wainaina Binyavanga, goes and does something that could get you killed or imprisoned in many parts of the world – he came out and revealed that he was gay.

In many ways, one had to be Kenyan, and be living in Kenya too, to do something like that. Invariably we have to ask, why could Binyavanga come out and still not be lynched by the baying anti-homophobic hordes?

So Lupita represents one chapter in a Kenyan story, where the distressing aspects of its politics is just one chapter.

More critically, some things happen to nations whose people go out in the world and conquer. First, at home, their fellow citizens begin to gain confidence, and see the world as a more open space than the narrow-minded nationalists often portray it to be.

Secondly, a nation which has many of its people as world champions in sport, whose books get on global best-selling lists, and who get to star in international films, eventually also becomes a society that is more open to the world.

That is one of the many ways in which civilisation spreads in the 21st Century.

[email protected] & twitter: @cobbo3