Next ‘Utamaduni Day,’ expect to see me in my true African wear

Although the contours of my thigh muscles are no longer what they used to be, on the new-fangled Utamaduni Day a couple of days ago, I wanted to wear my precolonial African underwear and, holding a spear, strut the villages like a true scion of Murang'a hunters and gatherers.

Like my failing body parts, the brains of our so-called leaders seem to have undergone irreversible intellectual atrophy. As the country suffered flooding, rising youth unemployment, and myriad other problems, the Kenyan Cabinet had a sitting in which the most important agenda was to rename our national days.

CULTURALLY UNSOUND

Boxing Day (December 26) was creatively renamed Utamaduni (culture) Day. This is in line with Building Bridges Initiative’s recommendation that we should “replace Boxing Day on 26th December with a National Culture Day for celebrating culture and learning about other Kenyans’ cultures.” The recommendation is in the same document that calls Kenyan rural practices and technologies “primitive.”

When they mention “culture,” our policymakers seem to be thinking about a static remote (“primitive”) past that has been destroyed by modernity, not the sum-total of the ways we struggle daily to overcome unemployment and exploitation by a repressive regime. They mobilise the term in a narrow sense to, with apologies to Raymond Williams's Culture and Society, discourage democracy, revolution, and popular education.

GENGE TONE

Yet nobody expresses Kenyan culture today better than such modern popular artists as Ethic, Sailors Gang, Ochungulo Family, and Boondocks Gang. In the narrow conception of culture, these would be heathens we should exterminate from our national platforms. They are the cause of Kenyan problems.

Too much culture is for the uncultured. Sometimes I wonder why our so-called leaders and policymakers are in suits and ties (not the African undergarments of their ancestors) when they try to push their idea of culture down our throats.

But I remember almost immediately that they’re only good at giving lip service to anything genuinely African. Their lawyers are British; the PR firms they use to brainwash us are based in London; and they get their suits from Western metropolises. African culture, to them, is just another term to bandy around in their badly written speeches.

TRULY KENYAN

In the traditional African spirit of utu (being human and behaving humanely) as conceived by an impressive galaxy of Kenyan scholars such as James Ogude, Mary Kinyanjui, John Mbiti, Wangari Maathai, David Kirwa Tarus, and Besi Muhonja, to claim to be a true African Kenyan today is to be able to willingly return family lands stolen from the poor; create jobs for the youth; end corruption in the institutions you’re in charge of; protect the environment; and, among other virtues, respect human life.

The rhetoric about, for example, restoring the pro-FGM muthirigu Kikuyu songs of the 1920s, out of their anti-colonial contexts, in the 21st-century Kenya is all hogwash.

Rigid adherence to culture — any culture in the world — is for conformists afraid of change. I am too old now to dictate to young people what they should consider their culture. But from talking to a few, I’ve learnt that, to them, the urban Genge Tone is the true expression of Kenyan culture, not your traditional mugoiyo (Kikuyu), kilumi (Kamba), entabanana (Kisii), etc.

To the youth, if this is the kind of music you value, you’re welcome to go die and enjoy it with the ancestors who composed it to talk about the problems of their days. Modern Kenya needs new songs about betrayal by our so-called leaders, who practice not the ”utamaduni” (culture) they preach but “tamaa duni” (laughable greed).

CHANGING TIMES

Culture is dynamic. A few years from today, Boondocks Gang‘s lyrics, including their “Kidole” (my favourite), will be considered too clean by the youth of those days.

Believe you me, I have received a good beating in my youth for dancing to the “dirty” music of Joseph Kamaru, which today has been consecrated as part of our true “utamaduni,” sung by even Catholic priests in their sermons and danced to by a head of state. Boondocks are the Kamarus of the future. Even in my old age, I can bet my dentures that “Wamlambez” will one day in my lifetime be a praise-and-worship song in churches.

Change cannot happen without theory. What might be needed at the moment is to expose the artist to the radical philosophy of Amilcar Cabral, Malcolm X, Thomas Sankara, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Micere Mugo, Steve Biko and others, so they can produce politically conscious music in the same league as the poetry of Ukoo Flani Mau Mau.

EVIL DYNASTIES

With some little dose of theory, the youths will fully embrace change from below and stop using dynastic stage names, such as “Almighty King Conqueror,” the kind of names we were known by when serving the devil, the dynasties we now oppose. The major problem is that once the establishment feels threatened by the youth, it will either selectively bribe them to drive its agenda or provide them with drugs and alcohol to destroy them from above, especially if they’re just anarchic and untrained in theories of struggle.

I must congratulate our so-called leaders and the BBI team that recommended “Utamaduni Day” on seemingly having not read any Frantz Fanon or Wole Soyinka regarding primordial African practices. Fanon particularly warns against fetishising precolonial traditions; primacy should be given to liberation; culture follows nationalism, not the other way around. In Kenya, once we create jobs for the youth and free the nation from the oligarchs that control its politics, the rest will fall in place naturally.

In addition, the problem of ethnic balkanisation in Kenya doesn't emanate from ignorance about other people’s cultures. We know them very well. But our establishment politicians, using the divide-and-rule tactics of colonialists and slave-holders, have brainwashed us to devalue one another.

MIRAGE

Utamaduni is a mirage. Discussing the Ghanaian kente clothing in his beautiful book Cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah has demonstrated how foreign some of the items and concepts we consider traditional can be. In the era of globalisation and intercultural exchanges, very little in Kenya today is authentic. It would even be silly to try and vacuum pack our cultures, except for consumption by unsuspecting foreign tourists.

The night before I left George Magoha’s University of Nairobi deluded that I would land on greener pastures in the US, some of my literature students organised a clandestine farewell party in which they gifted me some expensive African shirts, so I could represent their country well in foreign lands as I ate my burgers and other delicacies packed with liberty and vitamins.

I had never worn such clothes all the time I’d lived in Kenya; I got most of my Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger underwear from Gikomba. And I suspect the students bought the “African” shirts from Europe using their cabin-crew friends at Kenya Airways. The “African“ shirts were made in Malaysia, probably using Vietnamese fabric.

Don’t let Dr Larry Ndivo of Machakos University, one of the students, ever know this: I never wore those things they gave me, except once when I was rained on as I went to work and decided to put on one of the “African” souvenirs I kept in my office.

“Nice shirt you got there, Evan!” an American friend complimented me, visibly envious.

“Thank you,” I blushed, before resuming a peacock gait, “I inherited it from Okonkwo.”

In a bid to genuinely Kenyanise my wardrobe a few months ago, I asked Fundi Okoth in Kawangware to make me some nice Kitenge shirts. “Not so bright or too multi-coloured, jatelo,” I begged him. “I don’t want to walk around the city looking like a pimp.”

AFRICAN UNDERWEAR

The shirts looked great on me, and I felt like I was at last becoming a real African. But all, except two, got torn up as I tried to get out of them at the end of the day. Without lessons on how to undress, it looks like I’d need a kitenge a day to qualify as a Kenyan. Or do people shower and sleep in them? The only memory I have of the shirts now is a selfie I took in one of them.

For convenience, then, African underwear alone will do for me next Utamaduni Day.

My dog Sigmund has been asking me why I can’t return home and help craft a cultural policy instead of just making noises in the newspapers like a cowardly mongrel. But he knows more than anybody else that immediately I left Magoha‘s University of Nairobi, I became one of the most expensive academic prostitutes. Your government would need to take a loan from China to just pay my African underwear allowance.

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