Kenya in three stories on book thieves, digital vigilantes, golf

A trader selling second hand books to parents along the Makadara Road in Mombasa on January 4, 2017. PHOTO | KEVIN ODIT | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • There are backstreet book printers, who collude with headteachers to rip off genuine textbooks.
  • Looking to the years ahead, one can expect that this digital vigilantism will grow, and expose on a grand scale, not just thieves, but suspected adulterers, drunkards and liars.
  • The criminals collude with teachers, steal school books, and sell them on the second hand market.

Three stories and developments in the media last week really got me thinking about how Kenyan, and African, society changes — or doesn’t.

We all know the jokes about if you want to hide something from an African, publish it in a book. In recent years, the high priests of reading have been mourning the “death of the reading culture”.

Then there was a story about how publishers are losing billions to book pirates. Two things happen here. There are backstreet book printers, who collude with headteachers to rip off genuine textbooks. They print cheap copies, and the school presumably pays the price of the genuine items for them, and then the pirates share the difference with the head teachers.

Then there is the less sophisticated book underworld. The criminals collude with teachers, steal school books, and sell them on the second hand market.

It is a “multibillion-shilling syndicate with branches all over the country”, said the story. This is costing genuine book dealers who pay taxes a lot of money, and at this rate, there will no longer be new books because writers will not be paid. Yet, there was also some joy to be found in this crime. First, it suggests that there is a market for books, if they could be cheaper.

DEPRESSING TALES

Secondly, at a time when there are depressing daily tales of the theft of billions of taxpayers’ money, car thefts, and home break-ins, it is a source of conflicted joy that books are fairly high on the list of things that Kenyans are stealing.

The other story was how social media has changed the face of vigilantism.

A story in The Standard said that in Dandora, Nairobi: “Members of the Facebook group Dandora Love People”…are now seeking to rid the estate of hardcore criminals.

“Members post pictures of the hardcore criminals and the crimes they commit or have committed, followed by warnings and it does not take long before the suspects are killed [mostly by police or mobs].
“Pictures of the slain gangsters are then posted on the page as a warning to others.”

There are claims that this digital vigilantism has reduced crime in Dandora, but also the alarm that it is fuelling extra-judicial killings and targeting youth. The digital vigilantes have also received death threats, but remain undeterred.

FILL A VACUUM

This whole affair illustrates, on the laudatory side, how citizens are using technology to fill a vacuum in law enforcement that has been left by the State. The downside is how it allows people, who would in the past never have lifted a stick to hit a thief, to participate in mob justice because of the impersonality and anonymity that social media affords them.

Looking to the years ahead, one can expect that this digital vigilantism will grow, and expose on a grand scale, not just thieves, but suspected adulterers, drunkards, liars, name it. It’s inevitable and scary. But it’s also exciting, because one can see that it will force a most dramatic reorganisation of our societies.

Finally, the other weekend there was the Barclays Kenya Open at the Muthaiga Golf Club. No news there, you might say. There have been several of these in the over 100 years of the club.

But this was different. I don’t remember a time when a golf tournament was so widely covered in the Kenyan media, and when it was, it showed so many people in attendance.

SOMETHING SCARY

Finally, a photograph of the golf-watching crowd ended up on the cover of the Business Daily. That is the equivalent of having your portrait as the day’s doodle on Google’s search landing page.

We can explain it with the usual African “middle class” thing, but that wouldn’t do it justice. The insight is an economic one, yes, but there is also an interesting demographic one.

The (former President Mwai) Kibaki years saw a boom in the game, and what we saw was a large turn-up of the “golf offspring”, because they are now of age.

To grasp the significance of that, it’s worth noting that Nairobi and the surrounding areas have more golf courses than the rest of the East African capitals combined. That of its own has democratised access to the game more than elsewhere in the region. Rather than a moment of elitism, we might have instead been witnessing the “massification” of golf. If that is true, you will agree, there is something scary about it, too.

The author is publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. @cobbo3