The Nairobian is all about how women oppress men

The Nairobian is a deceptively subversive paper that tells us, albeit in a deconstructive way, all that we do not want to hear and accept as what defines our reality. This is hidden to many of its readers. I often refer my students to this paper especially when teaching introduction to mass communication and all practical writing courses.

In a classroom situation, I always find myself alone when I engage my students on the framing of stories in this paper. In their unsophisticated way, my students end up revealing more about the seditious nature of this paper. Believe me; this paper sets an agenda on gender relations like no other paper in modern Kenya.

The Nairobian is a podium to display the struggle of challenged masculinities. It shows how men have been emasculated and rendered hopeless by modern changes. It is interesting that patriarchal structures that exist in our society make it possible for the production and consumption of culture that purports to effectively control one sex over another.

In this case, the biological male controlling the female in power relations. This lie is discussed and dismissed in The Nairobian.

To understand the subversive nature of this paper, we have to take cognisance of feminist concerns, which have strived to redress women’s place in culture, society and history. We have to see this newspaper in light of the philosophies of Julia Kristeva, Helen Cixous, and Luce Irigaray that inform gender discourses in the sense that they delight in illuminating the internal contradictions in seemingly perfect and coherent systems of thought.

The Nairobian echoes the voices of these scholars who are interested in reinterpreting traditional Freudian psychoanalytic theory and practice. Their thoughts are tied together by an external perception with roots in Simone De Beauvour’s Second Sex, which questions why women are the second sex or, in postmodern terms, why the woman is the ‘other.’

Rather than view this condition as something to be transcended, they proclaim its advantages. If readers think this newspaper is simple and unsophisticated, then it is only in terms of style and language. But when you dig deeper, you discover all possibilities that recognise Kenyan women as active agents in the struggle for space in a patriarchal society. It tells us how our women strategise within concrete constraints to “bargain with patriarchy” and exert a powerful influence on their gendered subjectivity.

The women are busy ‘busting’ their amorous husbands, divorcing rich and influential men and exerting their presence everywhere. The mpango wa kando is shouting to be heard and recognised and some are not ashamed to display curves that their mamas gave them. This is a real challenge to masculine hegemony.

It is this subtle and active resistance that women display in the stories foregrounded in The Nairobian that we need to interrogate so as to explore women’s inventiveness in creating hierarchies by subverting ideological boundaries. This should enable us see how women experience gender. It should also help us to understand socio-economic relations of power and how women perceive these relations consciously or unconsciously. The framings of stories about women in The Nairobian departs from the obvious and portray women, not as passive and submissive conformists to patriarchal authority, but active agents of subversion.