Artists verdict: Beautyful ones are yet to be born

In the 2012 film, Nairobi Half Life, David “Tosh” Gitonga reminds us that Kenya’s criminal justice system is choking from corruption. In the police cells, inmates wade through stifling human waste, condemned to clean up the filth.

Ironically, no matter how hard they clean up, the police remain mired in filthy transactions that make guilt and innocence a negotiable affair — those who pay get out; those who don’t await their fate in the courts.

Gitonga’s graphic portrayal of human waste reminds us of an old cautionary tale by another artiste whose depiction of the filth in Ghana’s civil service in the 1960s became a big literary talking point. Ayi Kwei Armah’s main character — simply called “the man” — finds solace in the company of Teacher. Together they have resisted the dodgy paths to “the good life”.

“The man” is under immense financial pressure from his wife Oyo and their three children, but he refuses to take a bribe from a timber merchant who wants preferential treatment at the railway station where “the man” works. To show up her husband’s feebleness, Oyo signs up as a front for dubious boat business run by Joe Koomson, a government minister whose house of glittering glass drips wealth and mocks his old classmate, “the man”.

When the government is suddenly ousted,  Koomson fears for his life and flees to “the man’s” house. As the military approach the front door, “the man” takes Koomson out through the back door, into his pit latrine, along a passage of waste that ends up at the beach and the waiting boat.

Thus reeking of excrement, Koomson flees the country as “the man” swims back ashore, cleansing himself in the sea-water. He is surprised to find Oyo, looking at him with admiration.

The moral of the story is clear: the corrupt are mired in a filth that can never be expunged; the honest may suffer grave humiliation, mockery and doubt but their reward is never too far off. Their capacity to show us the errors of our ways confirms that the law of natural justice eventually prevails. In the meantime, The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born (1968).

Contemporary Kenyan writers have restated the wisdom of the generation of Armah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Francis Imbuga whose stark portrayals of an inhumane society might have read like fantastic fables of non-existent societies.

When, in Devil on the Cross (1980), Ngugi described conmen who threaten to sell us the very air that we breathe, we accused him of stretching allegory and misusing fable. But in the succeeding years, didn’t we live to see wheeler-dealers selling chalk, instead of chlorine, to the authorities mandated to provide purified water in our cities?

Recently, Ngugi’s daughter Wanjiku reminded us that with corruption, everything is on sale — even innocent infants and the wombs of desperate young women in the low-income settlements of Nairobi.

In The Fall of Saints (2014), Wanjiku gives a chilling portrayal of a child trafficking racket set up by a priest, a female evangelist, a gospel singer and politicians with shadowy international connections that run from America to Europe.

M.G. Vassanji’s, The In Between World of Vikram Lall (2003) is another remarkable example of the corroding power of corruption. In a world that is riddled by lawlessness, what is the role of the individual; what responsibilities does s/he bear? Vassanji studies corruption from the point of view of the practitioner, Vic, an innocent civil servant who gradually caves in to peer pressure and ends up being labelled “one of Africa’s most corrupt men”. 

Anyone who wants to understand the interplay between graft and power should read Vassanji.

They should also study the editorial cartoons of Gado (Godfrey Mwapembwa). Gado’s witty censure has been incisive, bold and broad. In February 2009, he surprised many when he made it plain that both sides of the mseto government were a stinking sewer, each as compromised as the other.

We might want to pretend that it is only expatriate artistes like Gado, Wanjiku Ngugi, Vassanji, John Le Carre (The Constant Gardener, 2001) and Nicholas Drayson (A Guide to the Birds of East Africa, 2008) who trumpet the moral rot in our midst. But the reality is that local artistes call out the shame of our moral bankruptcy daily.

I969, Joseph Kamaru exposed corruption in schools with his chart-bursting reprimand, Ndari ya Mwarimu. His eye was not on government; it was on the way “big men” in “little places” exploit  authority to benefit themselves.

But perhaps the helplessness of people who are at the mercy of corrupt professionals finds its greatest resonance in Wamugunda Geteria’s Nice People (1992). Geteria shows corrupt doctors exploiting HIV/AIDS patients as the government crushes its people further by failing to implement policies that will focus on research and prevention.

Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye (Chira, 1997) and Meja Mwangi (The Last Plague, 2000) used the image of the wasting, HIV/AIDS-riddled body as a metaphor for a degenerative society that is collapsing from religious hypocrisy, economic decline and abuse of political power.

Arguably, throughout the Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Moi years, no artiste demonstrated the use of the State as an instrument for accessing public resources — especially on ethnic lines — more consistently or poetically than the benga maestro, D.O. Misiani. Misiani famously described this world as drunk — Piny Ose Mer (1989) meaning, the world is upside down. 

Misiani’s capacity for witty allusion probably inspired the late, great rapper, Poxi Presha (Prechard Pouka Olang). In 2001 Poxi Presha and the Nairobi City Ensemble remixed Franklin Boukaka’s haunting 1970 anthem, Le Boucheron. Kenyans who were reared on a diet of VoK’s lunch-time music on the National Service station knew the song simply as “Africa”, a ballad with a plaintive saxophone played by Manu Dibango.

With Poxi Le Boucheron became much more than a lament about the woodcutter who is exploited by politicians. In between the sung verses — performed by Paddy Makani — Poxi took an angry look at our post-independence decay, decrying our culture of exploitation - “Kanyaga mtu upite, that is the life I have seen”. He also posed a sad question about our fate: “Was our freedom an unwanted pregnancy?”

More recently, the poster-boy for apathy — Abbas Kubaff (Andrew Kabiru) — was moved to denounce our growing inhumanity in A million rhymes. With memorable wit, Abbas covered several corrupt schemes — the 2009 maize scam; Triton oil; poaching, unwarranted pay-hikes for MPs; unpaid dues from Music Copyright Society.

Similarly, in Utawala (2013),

Julius Owino aka Juliani uses memorable alliteration to record our political culture. He castigates the circus called election campaigns because policies are forgotten as candidates sell their faces and buy ethnic loyalty – “ufisadi, ubinafsi, ukabila; kuuza sura ‘wataki kuuza sera”.  Juliani’s urges commitment to doing the right thing — “sita simama maovu yakitawala!”

Over time our artistes have dissected the depravity called corruption with increasing precision. Earlier publications depicted corruption as a singularly male vice, but recent writing by authors such as Wanjiku wa Ngugi has zeroed in on the gender-blindness of this affliction.

Contemporary artistes have also demonstrated that corruption exists in every profession — religious leaders, watchmen, medical doctors, mechanics, teachers, lawyers, industrialists, journalists, politicians, everyone. As the modern proverb says, “you eat where you work!”

It was probably Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe who first burst the bubble on the illusion that the elite are the only ones who propagate corruption. In A Man of the People (1968), the narrator — Odili Samalu — stands fuming as he watches “ignorant villagers dancing themselves lame and waiting for to blow off their gunpowder in honour of one of those (Chief Nanga M.A. Nanga, Minister of Culture) who had started the country off down the slopes inflation”.

Dr. Nyairo is a Cultural Analyst