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Why the poor cultural heritage? It all began in State House

Mzee jomo kenyatta,president;kenya  Mzee jomo kenyatta waves his flywhisk during kenya independence celebrations at uhuru park 12th december 1963 PHOTO: FILE/STANDARD  

We live in a continent where, because of history, nearly all in-coming presidents must declare their political and economic stand. Unfortunately such positions often arrive with subtle cultural baggage.

This issue forms the core of any discussion on our continent’s cultural development. What makes the Kenyan case interesting is that we regressed from the Cold War, and are now content to add African West (Nigeria) and African South (South Africa) to the matter of national culture, including book culture.

Perhaps it is because ours is a state of gullible people, and the plague incubates in the Kenyan State House.

It is not that there is more cultural pride in being identified with either Russia or America, than in taking sides with Nigeria or South Africa.

In fact, strictly speaking, there might be less shame in copying your neighbour’s dance, than in losing your head in a politico-cultural crossfire between a pair of siblings who live on two distant ends of the world.

What we must accept is that nothing has historically hurt Kenyan culture more than this taking of sides.

What we should ask is whether it is ever possible for states to chart their own cultural path in spite of the burden of colonial and Cold War history.

The answer is in the affirmative. Yes, because we know of South Africa, DR Congo, Algeria, Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, and a host of other African countries which went through the oven of colonisation, but emerged way more culturally prolific than Kenya.

Nearly all the above countries went through colonial hell in comparison to Kenya. It is even tempting to argue that you need your oppressor’s extreme cruelty to turn you against his culture.

We all know of apartheid (South Africa); King Leopold’s gold mines (DR Congo); the Algerian Civil War (Algeria); and the house for the breaking of slaves in Goree Island (Senegal).

As for Nigeria, the bursting African-American eyeball summarizes the dark misery of crossing the Atlantic from 1619 till the mid-19th century.

The above atrocities might therefore have turned respective African countries against copying the white man’s culture, even at the individual level. But let us observe that, in the above cases of national cultural success, perhaps nothing helped more than the symbolic position of ‘The State House’.

In way of rallying the Senegalese people to be proud of their culture, Leopold Sedar Senghor was matchless in the African content. Even today, I do not know what Presidents Macky Sall, Jacob Zuma, or Joseph Kabila would tell you if you suggested that they should sing, dance, or write like white people.

In terms of presidents, the Kenyan terrain is a very unlucky cultural story. I did not know that, after it was started in 1974, the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature was not awarded in some years due to ‘lack of funds’ (Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978).

 And even now, the Burt Awards for Kenyan Literature (a Sh1.7million prize sponsored by a Canadian philanthropist), motivates the Kenyan writer more than a prize named after this country’s first president (the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature offers a total of Sh225 000).

Certain circumstances would force you to blame Kenya’s cultural failure on former President Moi only up to a reasonable limit.

I would not even attempt to smear it on the third president. I was still an undergraduate in 2002, but the media had already warned me that Mr Kibaki was a ‘gentleman’ – not in the African sense, but in the English one.

Even if you were the most optimistic man on Earth, you would be extremely unrealistic to expect that Kenyan art could improve in an environment of ‘ladies and gentlemen’.  

But look, Senghor was a Frenchman in everything but skin. I hear that his pronunciation was vintage French. Yet he and two others (Aime Cesaire and Leon Damas) still managed to found the Negritude Movement. Nyerere internalized Western philosophy and used it to fashion out his own African philosophy (Ujamaa).

The cultural impact of these two philosophies on respective national arts is immeasurable. I suspect that something effeminate in the Kenyan mind equates only a few years in Oxford, Makerere, the London School of Economics, or even Boston, with an excuse for presidents to shirk all responsibility towards their people’s cultural development.

And it is unfortunate because all Kenyan presidents except one, were people who – because of their education abroad – knew very well what successful fellow presidents were doing elsewhere in the world.

I think President Uhuru Kenyatta will have broken record. On day one, the competition is stiff between you and your deputy, on who will beat the other at dressing like an American president. Sounds like a joke, but the symbolic echo of it reaches the ears of the ants.

 

 

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