It’s time to transform the way in which producers of Kenyan culture operate

Most Kenyan scholars who hold a PhD in the natural sciences (especially in medicine) are aware of a not-so-handsome truth about the history of medical research in America, a systematic plot which ran for nearly 40 years from 1932 till 1972, and for which President Bill Clinton finally apologised to African-Americans in 1997. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study in Alabama involved the state enlisting of 600 African-American men (without their knowledge and consent) in a medical study which sought to find out what happened if black victims of the disease were left untreated.

A depressing aspect of the narrative is that American doctors already knew syphilis could indeed lead to madness and death, and even though its cure, penicillin, was discovered in 1947, the 600 African-American guinea pigs were intentionally neglected. The disease slowly spread from fathers to mothers, and finally to children via breast milk. A frosty relationship between African-Americans and state health services endures to this day.

Analogies are problematic in that they are occasionally too simplistic. However, it is not reductive to observe that the problem with Kenya’s cultural development, and therefore to nationhood, partly stems from the well-known ‘structural syphilis’ that dogs the production and consumption of Kenyan culture.

This is in turn tied to the state’s current treatment of humanities and the social sciences as contained in an equally inhumane scientific myth uttered by a government official sometime last year, to the effect that the non-sciences are economically unviable. Kenya’s four presidents who are – ironically – graduates of the humanities and social sciences have proved reluctant to address the organisational context of cultural production (especially music and books) in spite of research which affirms the sector’s economic potential.

We can quickly dispense with the above myth because it draws from neither fact nor logic. Politics is itself a humanity. Hence science-leaning government officials who doubt its capacity to spur economic growth might best demonstrate their conviction by quitting and inventing a new kind of alternative science through which the world’s 195 countries can actualise their economic development.

The fact is that tomes of research on Kenya’s cultural production and its connection to the state of under-employment of Kenyan producers of culture point foremost to the state’s failure to implement structures that respond to the needs of the publishing industry, be it writers or musicians. Scholars show that Kenyan writers and musicians cannot depend exclusively on their art mainly because relevant bodies lack the capacity to implement laws that exist in the country’s statutes.

An example is the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) whose recent good efforts led a journalist to write: “The Kenyan entertainment and media market was worth Sh210 billion in 2016, up 13.6 per cent in 2015. Revenue is also expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.5 per cent over the next five years, hitting the Sh300 billion mark in 2020, and totalling Sh320 billion in 2021” (The Standard April 6, 2019).

These billions of shillings trash the misleading perception that the humanities are incapable of gainful employment in the Kenyan context. Our historical problem with cultural production has always been inadequate state commitment and will to ensure that proceeds reach intended creators of culture rather than disappear in the hands of middlemen.

Kenya’s past three regimes had their achievements in addressing the above problem. The Moi tenure can be credited with doing more than the other two, whose probable weaknesses were age (Jomo Kenyatta’s) and class (Mwai Kibaki’s). It has been observed that Jomo’s regime had no Ministry of Culture.

The current Sports and Culture docket began as a small department during the Moi era, in which MCSK was also founded in 1983. President Uhuru Kenyatta’s choice for that ministry broke the records of all the three past regimes – not even the most optimistic Kenyan writer, musician, athlete, or footballer ever expected the Head of State to understand their unique challenges.

A discourse last year sought to draw the boundary between sciences and the humanities, and the competing contributions of each branch of knowledge to Kenya’s economic growth.

It is not the kind of uninformed exchange any politician would dare utter in South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal or even Tanzania, nations where people are keenly aware that a continent synonymous with inequities and inequalities definitely needs the sciences, but that the humanities and social sciences are at the core of redressing issues of history and wealth re-distribution.

South Africans know very well that nearly all her vociferous anti-apartheid campaigners (Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Albert Luthuli, Robert Sobukwe, Desmond Tutu) – except perhaps for Steve Biko – were graduates of the humanities and social sciences.

The above acknowledgement in Africa’s struggle against foreign and home-grown autocracy informed the founding of the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences in 2013, that funds over 600 South African and international PhD students in the humanities and social sciences at South African universities.

We can question the quality of these scholars; however, we must also ask what new species of amoeba our science PhDs have tried to discover beyond airing elementary ideas on how to fix the Kenyan economy. After all, they themselves succumbed to the humanities by joining politics and practising a very Pharisaic version of Christianity.

President Uhuru’s regime could help cure this ‘structural syphilis’ in arts by transforming the environment in which producers of Kenyan culture operate.

- The writer is a PhD candidate