As the year ends, we need to start reflecting on what to do with culture across country

Reflections on the year that ends is in some sense a vain activity. But it is human nature to remember. For memories make it possible to dream again. Nostalgia does have its value. At times like these, when the economy is tumbling down south without any signs of stopping, when money seems to flee the pockets as if it has been threatened, nostalgia for the good old days is worth holding on.

But 2019 wasn’t a particularly good year for Kenyans. Yet good is a relative word. For it was not all that bad either. As usual, there was the good, the bad, and the ugly, to borrow Sergio Leone’s movie title. We don’t need to rehash them all here. However, there are a few things worth remembering about our literature, art and culture.

EMPTY PROMISES

To begin with, the government still has not delivered the ‘theatres’ it promised when it sought the votes of Kenyans. Even as politicians and bureaucrats talk about legacy projects, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that each of the eight regions of Kenya, let alone the 47 counties, will have a decent theatre, where locals can perform and consume their cultures, arts and literature. Where old social halls or community centres still exist, they remain the only evidence that the government retains some interest in the arts and culture.

KCC ABANDONMENT

Even the Kenya Cultural Centre/Kenya National Theatre (KNT) seems like an abandoned homestead. It costs too much to stage a play there. The centre doesn’t seem to have a programme of activities to keep it busy. Despite the millions of shillings that were spent in renovating it, the main hall largely sits unused; the bar/restaurant has been closed for quite some time now; and the small hall (ukumbi mdogo) is a rundown room that puts shame to any claim of this place being the home ground of Kenyan art and culture. But all this seeming abandonment of the KCC isn’t surprising.

Why? Because despite the national policy on culture and heritage, it is near impossible to figure out what the government (national and county) holds as important art and culture in Kenya. For instance, the two most important government-linked art and culture events in Kenya are the annual Kenya National Schools and Colleges Music Festival and the Kenya National Drama and Film Festival. The government generally sponsors them. Yet to perform at these events, schools have to pay huge sums of money.

ALL TALK, NO ACTION

The government has been claiming that it will set up talent academies to admit the hundreds of brilliant performers in music and drama at these festivals but nothing seems to have come out of these promises. Don’t talk about the Kenya Film School. Visit the website and make up your mind if it is a school at all.

But why should we bother about the government and art and culture? Because there is a whole ministry, with hundreds of employees, whose mandate is to promote culture and heritage — The Ministry of Sports, Culture and Heritage. The ministry has two departments that directly deal with art and culture — Department of Culture and the Permanent Presidential Music Commission. These two departments are supposed to promote the production, dissemination and consumption of Kenyan art and culture. Yet listening to radio or watching TV reveals that the entertainment content is hardly Kenyan. We consume more foreign music — including from our neighbours Tanzania and Uganda — than our neighbours do.

Many governments know the value of art and culture. These promote national idea(l)s — ever thought of Barcelona football club as an art institution, a cultural phenomenon and a Spanish/Catalonian national(istic) symbol? Art and culture prefigure a people’s identity — Eliud Kipchoge today ‘belongs’, literally’ to thousands of Kenyans at home and abroad.

Culture is often a point of contact and entry into a relationship — we do begin to speak to others with enthusiasm and curiosity when we know they are culturally ‘different’ from us, just as when we know they are ‘similar’ to us. So, it is in the interest of any serious government to develop and promote art and culture.

NO LOCAL SUPPORT

Which is why a significant portion of Kenyan art and culture is underwritten and promoted by foreign governments, which in turn create space for international/intercultural connection and dialogue. Thousands of Kenyan artists and cultural productions have been direct or indirect beneficiaries of Euro-American, Asian, Arabic and other foreign donors for many years since independence. Today, the two most visible cultural centres in Nairobi are the Alliance Francaise and the Goethe-Institut — Kenya. It is in these two spaces where one is likely to encounter the most creative of Kenyan performers in dance, music, poetry, visual arts, literature, theatre etc.

In return tens of foreign artists perform in these two centres, creating a fusion of arts and cultures that has seen several young Kenyan artists, frustrated at a lack of local government and corporate sector support. Indeed many are renowned Kenyan artists whose acts would never have been known beyond Kenya if it wasn’t for these foreign cultural centres. Alliance Francaise has been the mainstay for old and new music and theatre performers and visual artists in Nairobi/Kenya for a very long time. Goethe-Institut has supported music, literature and film for decades. And so have the Portuguese, Brazilians, Swedes, Norwegians, the British (how missed is the good old British Council!), among others.

UNREALISED POTENTIAL

On a brighter side, one can say that there has been a significant growth in theatrical production in 2019. There have been several plays staged at the KNT this year, as well as other theatrical spaces in the city. However, one cannot say much of theatrical productions in the rest of the country, save for an occasional production in Kisumu, Eldoret, Nakuru, Mombasa, among a few counties/towns in the country where a local or visiting theatre group stages a play occasionally during the year. Yet there are so many young men and women in the villages and neighbourhoods of Kenyans towns who could become better citizens and earn a living in the process if the government were to seriously invest in local theatre or music or dance.

It is, therefore, not surprising that many youths find music an easier and affordable artform. If one has a computer, have some lyrics on a piece of paper or on the phone and can download a music-making app, one is good to go. Or if one can convince a producer to listen to one’s demo tape, fame and some money can come some young woman’s or man’s way, often via YouTube or the FM radio stations.

CULTURAL EXPRESSION

Which is why the Wamlamblez song by Sailors and King Kaka’s poem Wajinga Nyinyi seem to have shocked government bureaucrats and self-appointed keepers of morality in the country, yet these are quite ‘normal’ in the world of a majority of Kenyans. For, as the young would say, things are different on the ground. Irrespective of how one views these two samples of popular cultural expression, the fact of the matter is that they say a lot about what the youth think and do, as well as what privileged Kenyans think and do about the rest of Kenyans.

The elite thinking about themselves and Kenyans can easily be summarised in the discussion about Musalia Mudavadi’s memoirs, Soaring above the storms of passion. Memoirs of public figures should reflect significant moments not just in the lives of the writer but also of the larger public that the person was/is situated in — born, raised, worked etc. Yet the public debate has been more about the ‘political intrigues’ in the book; about how the book is a ‘lament’ by Mudavadi about his relationship with Raila Odinga. In other words, what should or could have been the ‘big’ book of the year is really just another Kenyan political story of privilege and power.

KENYAN PUBLICATIONS

Yet there were other serious and interesting publications in 2019, of which three stood out for me. First is Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea — a book that takes on the arduous task of revisiting Kenyan history, from the pre-colonial times to the present; taking the reader from the east African coastal strip town of Pate to the oriental world of China and Turkey; linking not just peoples but cultures, politics, commerce; revisiting the geopolitics of smuggling, control of resources, the so-called war on terrorism, among many other subjects. This is the definitive Kenyan book of 2019.

Second is Mwenda Mbatiah’s Watoto Mwelusi — a novel that interrogates the fate of Africa/Africans, raising serious questions about what Africans can do to redeem themselves from racial, economic, political, cultural, or technological yoke of domination and manipulations? Some answers to these questions can be found in Mutu wa Githui’s novel Elders of the Mace, which seems to suggest that Africans would have to carefully integrate modern education, traditional values and technology to rise above the tyranny of poor leadership and underdevelopment. Mbatiah’s and Mutu’s books were winners of the Sarit Centre Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature 2019 in the adult fiction category.

In some sense it is so difficult not to lament the continuing loss of opportunities — for employment and income — in the arts and culture sector, considering that Kenya is a net importer of art and cultural commodities. In another sense, one remains always hopeful that the government will one day walk its talk, and that artists, writers and cultural enthusiasts will also one day realise that they need to see art and culture beyond mere beauty and invest in it personally and collectively. In the end, one prays that 2020 will be more productive and fulfilling culturally, if we took Eliud Kipchoge’s advice that ‘no human is limited’ seriously. 

The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]