KAMAU WAIRURI

Sep 27, 2023

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers is an illustration of what we can learn about a society and a state from a dispute.

Published

on

By

Disputes are an integral part of our daily lives. Both literally and figuratively, people are constantly stepping on each other's toes.

That being said, disputes are not all created equal—some are more serious than others. The determination of the seriousness of a dispute is subject, and often contingent, on the context. No matter the seriousness, disputes follow different trajectories. That is, they have different lives. While some disputes fizzle out easily, others escalate; while some may end with verbal insults, others result in brutal violence that may sometimes prove fatal. Some are handled between the parties in the dispute, others require the intervention of other actors, including elders, religious leaders, or officials of the state. Expectedly, as I highlighted in my doctoral study, the handling of more serious disputes depends on the nature of the dispute and its effects, the social positions of the actors and the resources that the people in the dispute are able to deploy as they seek to resolve the matter.

Over the last few decades, social scientists have showed that disputes—and how they are handled—can reveal much about societies and states. The scholarship of Sally Engel Merry and Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, among others, is particularly useful in this regard. In her book Getting Justice, Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among working class Americans, Merry explores how ordinary Americans bring family and neighbourhood disputes to court, seeking justice or revenge, and the effects that these efforts have on the actors and the society more broadly. In her turn, Weeks examines dispute management processes in KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, showing the different trajectories that disputes take, the various actors involved and the logics that underpin the different strategies that they adopt in seeking to resolve disputes. What both scholars do well is to show how the trajectories that disputes take differ from what is expected as per the documented procedures of handling disputes and how the formal and informal processes blur. The work that these scholars, and others, have done, gives us a good starting point for understanding disputes and how they are handled in different contexts. They also teach us how to use disputes to read societies and states.

In this essay, I reflect on what we can learn from the life of a dispute through a review of Katherine Boo's book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, published by Random House in 2013. Fitting with the genre of creative non-fiction, it is an incredibly captivating book that takes a very close look at life in Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai, India, that sits behind a concrete wall at the airport whose length was covered with signs of the promise of urban renewal that carried the slogan "BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER", hence "Behind the Beautiful Forevers".

While Katherine Boo uses the term "slum" to refer to the neighbourhood that she is writing about, I prefer the term "urban margins" that has been used by scholars to refer to these zones of urban relegation where multiple forms of deprivation accumulate. These places that are often densely populated, are marked by a failure of infrastructure that is evident in the lack of piped water, open sewers, lack of public services (e.g., schools and hospitals) and poor quality, often makeshift housing. Often, these neighbourhoods are marked by the police as hotspots for crime, entrenching the stereotype of the urban poor as a threat to the safety and security of the well-to-do in the city.

To be clear, Boo examines disputes on at least two distinct levels. On one level, the book is an exemplar of the disputes between residents of the city over the right to the city; the poor versus the elite. She asks who the grand and elegant promises of urban renewal that we often see in the colourful billboards and glossy brochures that promise to turn our cities into global cities are for, and what they mean for the poor residents of the city. Just like Constance Smith observes in her book Nairobi in the Making: Landscapes of Time and Urban Belonging which is situated in Nairobi's Kaloleni estate, Boo shows that these promises of urban renewal always carry the threat of the loss of home and livelihoods for the urban poor. Forced evictions, under the guise of turning the city into a global city, are a common phenomenon in Kenya and have been examined by other analysts like Mwangi Mwaura and Pauline Vata. Thus, even though Katherine Boo's book is situated in Mumbai, there is much in her work that resonates with what happens in other aspirational cities in the developing world. On another level, crucially, the urban margins are densely populated. It is estimated that Nairobi has more than 40 areas defined as slums that house approximately 60 per cent of Nairobi's population of 4.4 million people. Even though the veracity of these statistics is not easily verifiable, it is often said that 85 per cent of Nairobi's population occupies just 5 per cent of the city's land area. That is a lot of people in very close proximity.

Unsurprisingly, the frequency and intensity of disputes are directly linked to proximity. The closer people are to each other, the more likely they are to be in dispute with one another. Thus, Katherine Boo's decision to locate her analysis at the urban margins is apt. Additionally, given the inadequacy of infrastructure at the urban margins, including housing, much of the lives of the poor unfolds in public, further accentuating the probability that disputes will emerge between neighbours at the urban margins. This is not in any way to suggest that there are no disputes between neighbours in more affluent areas of the city; there are. In fact, we know of disputes in affluent areas that have resulted in brutal murders and the killing of Kevin Omwenga in Nairobi's Kilimani estate by his hitherto business partners is a case in point. Given that many disputes in affluent areas occur in private, behind closed doors, their prevalence is harder to assess. Similarly, it is hard to measure the prevalence of the interpersonal disputes at the urban margins. Nonetheless, we can rely on data on inter-personal violence as an indication of the levels of disputes. A study on violence at the urban margins of Nakuru County that I conducted with two colleagues revealed high levels of interpersonal violence, with sexual and gender-based violence and violence against children being particularly prevalent. To reiterate, this is not to say that disputes—or indeed violence—only occur at the urban margins, it is rather to suggest that they are probably more prevalent and more visible there.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers revolves around three families. The first is Abdul's family. Abdul is a young boy who has become an expert at sorting and selling garbage to recyclers, which prowess leads to the success of the business, shifting the fortunes of his family. He is said to have "bestowed on his family an income few residents of Annawadi had ever known".

Unsurprisingly, this earns the envy of their neighbour Fatuma (the second family), a crippled woman who is derisively referred to as "One Leg". Fatuma lives with her daughter while her husband works elsewhere. She is presented as a very promiscuous woman, with a sexual appetite that her aging husband is said to be unable to satisfy. As interesting as this theme of sex and how it is deployed in everyday negotiations in Annawadi is, it falls outside of my current analysis.

The closer people are to each other, the more likely they are to be in dispute with one another.

The third family is Asha's. Asha is a local level political operative who has ambitions of becoming a slumlord and has learnt how to access state resources by being a conduit for corruption for state officials. Beyond providing access to the slum to wealthy people who want to buy land in anticipation of its demolition, her role—and attaining success in it in order to become a slumlord—requires that she gain legitimacy by helping people to access state officials, and resolving conflicts.

Since jealousy is at the core of this story. It warrants a bit more attention. From Boo's work and my own research, it seems that envy, jealousy and suspicion are very common features of life at the urban margins. These themes recur in much of my own research in Kenya. Many of the young men who have been in trouble with the police that I interviewed for my doctoral study attributed their troubles to the jealousy of their neighbours. Some told me that they have learnt better than to buy new clothes or shoes for fear of causing jealousy among their neighbours. It is crucial to point out here that it is often not the jealousy itself that is the issue but rather how it interfaces with the brutal and ineffective criminal justice system that leaves the living in fear of being killed by the police. They aver that signs of material success are communicated to the police as evidence of their involvement in crime. To put it simply, combined with unconstrained state power, jealousy becomes a lethal weapon.

The saga at the centre of the book emanates from a dispute between Abdul's mother and Fatuma that leads to the latter's self-immolation. Ostensibly upset that sand from a wall that Abdul's family was building fell into her dinner, after a bitter exchange of words, Fatuma locks herself in her home and sets herself on fire. However, she is rescued by her neighbours and taken to hospital. Despite there being witnesses, including her own daughter who called for help, Fatuma claims that it was Abdul's family that had attacked her and set her on fire. The book opens with Abdul's family reckoning with the difficulties that are about to befall them and strategizing on how to survive them, beginning with Abdul's ultimately unsuccessful bid to escape.

From what might seem like an open-and-shut case to a casual observer, as lawyers are wont to say, the dispute transforms into a kind of vortex that draws many people into a lengthy, painful and destructive encounter with the corrupt Indian criminal justice system. The situation is worsened by Fatuma's eventual death at the hospital. While technically she doesn't die from the burns that she suffered but succumbs to a lung infection that she contracted at the hospital, this does not seem to matter, even were we to set aside the fact that Abdul's family did not set her on fire. Thus, Abdul's family find themselves facing a murder charge that unravels their lives.

This dispute becomes a powerful lens through which we can better understand the trajectory of disputes at the urban margins, especially when they unfold within the criminal justice system in the postcolonial world.

There has been much scholarship in the post-colonial world that has emphasized how corrupt the criminal justice systems in those countries are. In Kenya, for instance, the state police has been consistently ranked by Transparency International as the most corrupt institution in the country.

Thus, Katherine Boo's depiction of the Indian criminal justice system as corrupt does not come as a surprise. What the book does beautifully, however, is to present a powerful case study in just how this corruption unfolds in the day-to-day life of those at the urban margins.

Given that many disputes in affluent areas occur in private, behind closed doors, their prevalence is harder to assess.

Police corruption comes in many forms. One form is where police officers collude with thieves with whom they share the spoils. Boo records such claims in India, similar to the suspicions that residents of Githurai shared with me in my earlier work. That this theme has also been explored in popular culture—with the best example being the highly acclaimed film Nairobi Half Life—shows that it is widely understood as a feature of state policing in Kenya. Another form of police corruption is extortion. One form of extortion is where the police visit business premises regularly demanding to be paid bribes, a theme that I have examined at length in my doctoral study. Since people at the urban margins—in Annawadi and in Nairobi's Kiambiyu alike—often engage in economic activities that are, albeit to varying degrees, illicit, they are often extorted by the police. Often, they have to pay to avoid getting into further trouble with the police and in order to be able to continue operating their businesses. For example, since Abdul's business would not pass the test of legality, he has to pay bribes to the police regularly in order to continue operating.

The other form of police corruption we see unfolding in Annawadi is that of police demanding bribes so as not pursue the matter against Abdul's family. Again, this comes as no surprise. In his work on policing in Nigeria, Olly Owen records his interlocutors claiming that a bribe can turn "black into white". That is, for a small price, the accused can become the accuser. I have found similar sentiments amongst the people I have interviewed for my work in Kenya. The surprising element in this book that we often do not encounter in much of the literature on this subject, is the refusal of Abdul's family to pay the bribe. They seem to have the sense that paying the bribe will not end their problems but will instead expose them to further extortion by the police. They decide to follow the process.

It is not possible for us to know what would have happened if the family had paid the bribe. Similarly, we do not know for sure that it was their refusal to pay the bribe that worsened their experience with the criminal justice system, but we can reasonably assume that it did.

Some told me that they have learnt better than to buy new clothes or shoes for fear of causing jealousy among their neighbours.

We also see police officers colluding with other state officials to corrupt the judicial process by overlooking evidence and twisting the facts and thus aggravating the situation. Boo documents how police officers colluded with doctors to generate fake evidence about the cause of death which they then presented to the courts. However, this fake evidence is not purely aimed at making the situation worse for Abdul's family but also to solve bureaucratic problems, such as drawing what might be a complex case to a quick close (murders become suicides) or to avoid institutional responsibilities. For instance, the exaggerated extent of the burns on Fatuma's body was to cover the fact that she died of an infection contracted while undergoing treatment at the hospital. What was recorded as 35 per cent burns at admission became 95 per cent when she died. Moreover, the process of obtaining documents that are required in court, such as death certificates, provides another opportunity for police officers to extort people. That is, if they pay, such documents can be altered or fail to make it into the court files. However, in some cases, it seems that the police officers’ insistence on bribes or the various demands they make may also raise the price so high that they make it imprudent, or even impossible, for their targets to pay. It seems that Abdul's family may have been smarter for not acceding to the demands, as it was likely that the police would keep returning for more. In any case, at some point, the police dribble the ball off the pitch as, at a certain point, the matter has to go to court.

Even though Boo does not examine the corruption of the courts, she draws on Abdul's experience in the garbage trade to observe that "The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags." At the risk of repeating myself, none of these findings will be surprising to anyone familiar with the criminal justice system in Kenya, and elsewhere in Africa.

The other issue that emerges very strongly in the book is just how expensive the resolution of disputes through state institutions is. In my Githurai study mentioned above and my subsequent doctoral research, my interlocutors noted that the expense they faced while going to courts related to both time and money. Boo illuminates this well in her book.

Through her masterfully crafted narrative, it feels as if the case, which one sees could be resolved quickly, lasts forever. Incredibly, the saga is still not over even as the book ends. While the judge finally finds Abdul's family not guilty, Abdul's case in the minor court drags on. This illustrates the inefficiency of the criminal justice system in India. A similar situation persists in Kenya. For instance, on the backlog of court cases in Kenya, it has been reported that nearly half (46 per cent) go beyond the three-year mark.

Boo presents the attempts by the Indian government to resolve the backlog by creating what are called fast-track courts. This is one of the manifestations of the "access to justice" reforms that have been promoted in developing countries and are shaping much of the investments in judicial reforms, including in Kenya and Uganda. Through this case, and in line with some of the literature that critically examines these developmental agenda, we see how these efforts are geared towards improving the efficiency of the courts without really examining the more fundamental questions of what justice is and how it should be dispensed. No matter how quickly they process the case, the fast-track courts will not provide an answer to the question of whether the verdict of "not guilty" for Abdul's family amounts to justice, and if so, for whom. In other words, in our attempts to resolve the problems that plague our criminal justice systems, we tend to focus on fixing the processes without giving sufficient thought to the outcomes that the systems we have are designed to generate, and whether these align with what people involved in disputes want.

"The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags."

The dispute—and its aftermath—is very costly to Abdul's family financially. For one thing, Abdul is not able to continue with his business while he is incarcerated. The business is left to his ailing father and younger brother who are not any good at it. For another, the family must spend their money to pay the lawyer who is defending them, draining all their savings.

In much of the discourse on the justification of the criminal justice system, we are often told that the rehabilitation of offenders is one of its key aims. We see one of the masters at the Borstal Institution where Abdul is taken advising him to stay away from crime and Abdul commits to this. However, avoiding crime or unscrupulous business does not help him get ahead but rather significantly limits his business while benefitting his competitors. In other words, his "becoming good" comes at the expense of the economic wellbeing of his family, at a time when they are already being further impoverished by the dispute that has engulfed them. Pointedly, Boo asks a question that goes to the core of what we must consider if we are indeed to think about justice. She asks, "If the house is crooked, and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?" To this question I might add, "And if so, at what cost and at whose expense?"

This fake evidence is not purely aimed at making the situation worse for Abdul's family but also to solve bureaucratic problems, such as drawing what might be a complex case to a quick close.

What Boo is pointing towards here, is the fact that we cannot talk about justice in isolation. And, in a sense, this is where the two levels of disputes I noted earlier collapse into each other. The disputes between the residents of Annawadi must be understood in the broader context of the dispute for the right to the city. In this respect, Boo's examination of the idea of opportunity becomes particularly potent.

The complexity of life in Annawadi that Boo presents fails to fit into the neoliberal logics that are so often the basis for commenting on life at the urban margins and the advice proffered to residents, mostly by outsiders, on how to get out. With respect to opportunity at the urban margins, Boo says that "In Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they avoided. A decent life was the train that hadn't hit you, the slumlord you hadn't offended, the malaria you hadn't caught." In other words, one's life is not just in one's hands as many do-gooders (read motivational speakers) would have us believe. The context maters. As Boo highlights here, the outcomes in people's lives in the slum, quite often, come down to chance.

This is a powerful critique of the neo-liberal logic that suggest that what people need to get out of poverty is hard work and resilience, which is not to disregard the reality of the few that do. This book is a caution that even as we look at the narratives of those who make it out—the spectacular examples of success in the face of adversity—we must not miss the forest for the trees. We have to ask questions about the structural conditions that constrain the lives of people in the underbellies of our cities. We must ask what kind of structural conditions generate a context in which a disabled person can lie bleeding on the side of a road for hours—with absolutely no intervention whatsoever—until they die. We must then ask what kind of state only shows up after that person dies to collect the remains. The lives that Katherine Boo describes in her book are a testament to the observation that Judith Butler made a few years back that "the way that the state organises life produces some lives as more precarious than others".

For some of the reasons that I have discussed above and others, scholars have noted that poor and marginalised groups have limited access to state institutions, including in the criminal justice system. On the one hand, the literature shows how poor people are constrained by many factors, such as costs, from accessing the criminal justice system when they have been victimised. On the other hand, we see literature highlighting the victimisation of the poor and marginalised by the criminal justice system, including disproportionate exposure to police abuse and higher chances of being convicted and jailed. In Kenya, for instance, legal scholars Patricia Kameri-Mbote and Migai Aketch, note how poor people's lack of resources predisposes them to ending up in jail. However, before concluding this commentary, it is important to also point to the more complex ways in which people at the urban margins utilise the institutions of the state.

The disputes between the residents of Annawadi must be understood in the broader context of the dispute for the right to the city.

Katherine Boo, in a way extending the work of Sally Engel Merry, shows that the difficult relations that poor and marginalised people have with criminal justice institutions do not mean that they do not engage with them. To put it another way, to say that the urban poor have a limited and problematic access to the institutions in the criminal justice system is not to say that state institutions do not feature in their considerations of how to solve the problems they are facing. Even where poor people acknowledge the difficulties they face in pursuing justice through the criminal justice system, they sometimes place their bets on it for varied reasons. For instance, I have already noted how Abdul's family chose not to pay a bribe and instead go through the formal justice process ostensibly to limit their risk.

What is often not highlighted but has been noted by some scholars recently is how, in their attempts to resolve their disputes, some poor people deploy the criminal justice system against their neighbours. In a study of access to justice in Uganda, Sara-Jane Cooper-Knock and Ann MacDonald noted cases of people finding ways of using legal processes to enhance their negotiating positions in disputes, even where they would want those disputes to be resolved outside the court system.

In Fatuma's case, Boo gives a powerful, albeit extremely tragic example. Here is a case where someone is willing to set themselves on fire just so that they can exact revenge. The challenge here though is that the outcomes of such efforts are completely unpredictable. For instance, in Fatuma's case, it went horribly wrong because she caught an infection in the hospital and died, and people's lives began to unravel.

It turns out that we can learn a lot about a society and a state from a dispute. In this case, Katherine Boo presents us with a case where, as she puts it, "the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched by turning to a justice system so malign it sank them all."

The Elephant is helping to build a truly public platform, while producing consistent, quality investigations, opinions and analysis. The Elephant cannot survive and grow without your participation. Now, more than ever, it is vital for The Elephant to reach as many people as possible.

Your support helps protect The Elephant's independence and it means we can continue keeping the democratic space free, open and robust. Every contribution, however big or small, is so valuable for our collective future.

Donate Now

Dr. Kamau Wairuri is a researcher, writer, and educator. His research interest is in the politics of criminal justice in Africa.

Kenya's Police Are Violent and Unaccountable – Should They Be Abolished?

Kenya and Its Unreformable Police Force

Counterterrorism, Technology and Development in Africa

Uganda: What Went Wrong With Human Rights Discourse?

Need for Course Correction in the War Against Al-Shabaab

New Wine in Old Bottles: EAC Deploys Regional Force to the DRC

Under Fidel Castro's leadership, Cuba found its mission and played its part in the African continent's struggle for freedom and independence.

Published

on

By

In late December 1961, a ship flying the Cuban flag docked in Casablanca, Morocco. In the Bahia de Nipe‘s cargo hold were 1,500 rifles, 30 machine guns, four mortars, and an undisclosed amount of ammunition. On board was a small medical team. Once the passengers disembarked and the cargo was unloaded, the Bahia started its journey back to Cuba, this time carrying 76 wounded Algerian FLN rebel soldiers and 20 war orphans.

Fidel Castro's imprint is on almost every major revolutionary effort in Africa after 1959. To him, the anti-colonial dream was "the most beautiful cause of mankind". As the 1959 revolution was sweeping through Havana, only two Sub-Saharan African country were independent: Ghana and Guinea. Within the next decade, tens of others would join them. Several would have to first battle colonial powers and then fight Cold War and regional proxy wars.

In these chaotic theatres of war, Castro made allies, and in turn Cuba became a key player in Africa's future through military and humanitarian help.

The Bahia de Nipe, the ship that started it all, was built in Wilmington, California, in 1945. Just months before the Algeria mission, its captain and ten-man crew had diverted it to Virginia, United States and asked for asylum. The ship became the subject of a court case because it was carrying tonnes of sugar formerly owned by the poster child of American capitalism in Latin America, the United Fruit Company, whose plantations Castro had seized.

Even before he started sending boots to Africa in support of socialist revolutions, Castro was already an enigma who intrigued and scared Americans in equal measure. They became obsessed with killing him but failed to understand his motives until it was too late. His dedication to revolutions in Africa and Latin America was, to them, driven by a messianic attitude and an addiction to the adrenaline of revolutionary wars. But this was only partially true. Castro wasn't just interested in conflict for its own sake; he also wanted to increase the theatres of revolutionary war against imperialism, reducing the focus on Cuba herself.

Castro found fertile ground for revolution in Africa's anti-colonial wars and, in the Cuban leader, African rebels and governments found a friend who was sometimes too willing to help.

In 1963, for example, Cuba sent Algeria a 55-person medical team on such short notice that there was no one at the airport to meet them. The team didn't have passports when they left Havana on 23 May 1963, and landed in the North African country without any warm clothes. They also had to fend for themselves for the first few weeks before everything, including their pay, was sorted out.

Cubans were scary because, one American negotiator would say years later, "they were as ready for war as they were for peace".

Even countries such as Kenya—which by 1959 were already well on their way to independence—sent delegations to Cuba in the early 1960s. They had a different ask: help in training technocrats to handle the delicate, long-term work of statecraft. Despite making first contact in 1962, Kenya quickly became the bastion of capitalism in Eastern Africa, and distanced herself from Cuba and the Soviet Union. In fact, the East African nation only established proper diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2001, and opened an embassy in Havana in September 2016, after the US signalled a shift in relations.

***

In late 1964, the other icon of the Cuban revolution, Argentinian doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara, visited seven African countries, including Tanzania. In Dar-es-Salaam, Guevara met the leaders of the Simba Revolution—Laurent Kabila and his men. They were the survivors of slain Congolese icon Patrice Lumumba's once popular support.

They planned to overthrow the new CIA-backed regime in Zaire. With a small unit of Cubans, Guevara joined them on the front but they lost once the CIA sent in mercenary forces from other countries. The well-documented defeat was one of the first major proxy wars between Cuba and the US. Guevara would later write that they lost because Kabila and his forces were unprepared and undisciplined.

Cubans were scary because, one American negotiator would say years later, "they were as ready for war as they were for peace".

After the Zaire debacle, Cuba's focus then shifted to Guinea-Bissau where, with Cuba's help, rebels kept the Portuguese colonial government busy until 1974. Focus then shifted again, this time to another Portuguese colony in southern Africa: Angola. The immensely rich nation went into civil war immediately after attaining independence.

Three competing revolutionary movements jostled for power: the Soviet-backed MPLA found itself fighting the Zaire-backed FNLA and the South African-backed UNITA. Other countries, including Britain, East Germany, Yugoslavia, France, Romania Israel, China, North Korea, and the United States joined in what became a proxy war for southern Africa's future. Although the MPLA was in power, it was losing control of large swathes of the south and the south-east to its enemies.

Faced with an existential crisis, the socialist MPLA asked Cuba for help. They had already done so once, in May 1972, when they met Castro and his war cabinet as he toured five African countries. His commitment was wavering until Zaire and South Africa invaded Angola in August 1975.

When Cuba began sending forces to Luanda, the Americans and South Africans mistakenly thought Castro was doing the Soviet Union's bidding. They predicted that the Cuban effect would be minimal, so the only thing they did was to make countries deny Cuban flights landing rights to refuel. In response, Cuban planes flew lighter, making the 9,000km non-stop Transatlantic journey from Havana to Luanda. Most of them carried military and medical supplies.

Over the course of just three months, Cubans made 70 such flights to Luanda, and sent several ships to join in the war. Thousands of Cuban soldiers flooded into Angola on MPLA's side, bolstering its position and shocking the South African fronts, who realised they had underestimated Cuba's commitment. About this Castro would later say, "Given the distance between Cuba and Angola, our motto was: if we need one regiment, let's send ten." By early 1976, MPLA's fortunes were changing; there were 36,000 Cuban soldiers in Angola, a staggering number that was a deliberate form of psychological warfare.

In the early 1960s, European and American spies failed to spot the Cubans because Castro sent mostly black Cubans on mission. They blended in well, especially in countries like Guinea-Bissau, and the only quirk that gave them away was the growing popularity of beards and Cuban cigars.

Jonas Savimbi, the iconic leader of the rebel group UNITA, saw the intervention as "Cuban colonialism". Unlike the other great powers however, Cuba didn't seem to have any imperialist intentions. In fact, once the guns went silent, Cuban numbers reduced to 12,000 within months. Those who stayed were there to bolster the MPLA's position as South Africa and Zaire remained hostile.

The apartheid government continued supporting insurgencies in Angola, and intervened again to help its allies in the 1980s. In August 1987, Castro again bolstered Cuban forces in the country, increasing them to 15,000 soldiers. The war culminated in the Battle of Cuito Canavale, a town in southern Angola, in 1988. With the help of South African forces based in Namibia, UNITA beat back the MPLA across the Cuito River and tried to pin them in the small town.

When South Africa blew up an important bridge over the Cuito River in January 1988, the Cubans built a wooden one that they called Patria o Muerte (Fatherland or Death). It was a play on one of Castro's favourite quotes (and he had many in his famously long speeches): "Once a struggle begins there is no choice other than victory or death." More than 4,000 Cuban soldiers would die in Angola's battlefields, their greatest loss on foreign soil to this day.

***

There is little agreement on who actually won the battle of Cuito Canavale, and positions often depend on the point of history from which one is looking at the fighting. South Africa technically managed to attain its immediate goals, but soon realised that it was a war of attrition which it would lose either way. For South Africa, it had never been a war over Luanda, but over Namibia.

The apartheid government continued supporting insurgencies in Angola, and intervened again to help its allies in the 1980s.

For such a small country, Namibia carried the future of Southern Africa. A colony of South Africa at the time, it provided the buffer the apartheid government used to keep communism at bay, and busy, in Angola. South Africa rightly feared Luanda would become a base for rebel movements against the still existing colonies in the region. So the battle for Namibia—and southern Angola—became the true battle for the region. Throughout the war, the apartheid government made it clear it would only withdraw from Angola if the Cubans left. On the other hand, Angola demanded that South Africa leave both Angola and Namibia before the Cubans could leave.

Eventually, in June 1988, South Africa retreated and Namibia became an independent country. By November 1989, half the Cuban troops in Angola had left. In May 1991, two months before schedule, the last Cuban soldier boarded a flight back home. Three years later, South Africa also became independent, a process many believe was speeded up by the Battle of Cuito Canavale.

***

For Nelson Mandela and southern Africa's true liberators, Cuban intervention in the Angolan war destroyed "the invincibility of the white oppressor". Almost immediately after he was released in 1991, Mandela travelled to Cuba to personally thank the small island nation for its unparalleled help to Angola, and by extension "…the struggle for liberation of southern Africa". His friendship with the symbol of militant socialism was criticised by those who saw him as a hero of nonviolent struggle, which in fact Mandela wasn't. (Note that despite the lionising of Mandela in the West, the US kept him on its terror watchlist until July 2008.)

Like all revolutionaries, Castro was far from perfect. His legacy, especially political and economic, in Cuba itself is controversial but his dedication to the ideals of freedom make him one of the most important revolutionaries of his time. One person's revolutionary is another's terrorist.

For Nelson Mandela and southern Africa's true liberators, Cuban intervention in the Angolan war destroyed "the invincibility of the white oppressor".

Fidel Castro's most conflicting legacy in Africa is his intervention in the Ethiopia-Somalia conflict over the Ogaden region. Cuba and the Soviets helped wrest the Ogaden Plateau from Somalia in 1977; Cuba had 17,000 soldiers fighting for Ethiopia under Haile Mariam at the time. Even ignoring the controversies of the war itself, and how it impacted Somalia's chaotic future, Ethiopia was at the time a colonial power at war with her subject, Eritrea. The presence of Cuban soldiers and Cuba's tacit support kept the bullets flying, a clear contradiction for a man whose life's work was to destroy imperialism.

History is conflicted about characters like Fidel Castro, who straddled two generations and did so much that it is hard to box them in. Here was a man, born into relative privilege, who chose to fight for a cause. From a small, mixed-race island nation, he promoted that cause against a global giant and her allies with little money and a poor economy undergoing excruciating economic sanctions. Castro made a mark in history that cannot be erased.

Of course, some countries such as Angola to whose cause Cuba sacrificed so much are under a new form of oppression. But that's the thing about revolutions; one doesn't mean universal and infinite freedom. It doesn't mean the new powers will be perfect, and that a society will never again need a revolution.

Each generation has its own mission, and is cursed to find its own revolution. Under Fidel Castro, Cuba found its mission and played its part. Not just for itself, but also for a significant chunk of the African continent.

When he stood trial in 1953, Castro swore that history would absolve him. I think it already has.

While eugenics concepts did not directly shape policy, they formed a part of the larger racist ideologies that informed many laws of the colonial era, a good number of which survive to date.

Published

on

By

Maureen was in labour when it happened. The stern nurse needed an answer, but she was in too much pain to think. Her body and mind were fighting each other by that point. Twenty-two years old and lying on a stretcher outside the theatre at Kakamega Hospital, she had never felt more alone. And the nurse wouldn't let her be wheeled in until she signed the bloody forms.

"I can see in your file that you are HIV positive," the nurse said again, unmoved, "You must have tubal ligation since HIV positive women are not supposed to give birth." So she took the pen and signed, and then zoned out. When she came to, she was a mother. A few hours later, the child was dead. In her pain, she had signed away her right to ever have another baby.

That was in 2005.

Forced sterilizations of HIV-positive pregnant women first came to light in 2012, although it had been happening for decades. The report, Robbed of Choice, carries multiple stories like Maureen's. Almost all the cases documented were of poor women in public hospitals and non-governmental clinics. It was our modern form of eugenics informing unofficial policy with real consequences; an attempt to clean up the gene pool by getting rid of those we deem unfit, or at least take away their right to reproduce.

Derived from Darwin's theories and given its modern name by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, in the 19th century, eugenics is more about class than race. Although the concept preceded that era, it gained a new, organised lifeline that only began ending in the late 1930s. In its origins it was about getting rid of the undesirables, not just based entirely on skin colour, but also on socioeconomic status. Among its pioneers was Frederick Osborn who viewed eugenics as a social philosophy deserving of some form of proactive action. To actively do this in politically sensitive times required tact, such as deliberately under-developing certain areas, refusing to invest in education and healthcare, and sometimes undertaking outright sterilization. Although it never gained mainstream government approval as the governing philosophy in the colonies, it influenced and provided propaganda for many racially-driven policies.

It was a eugenics organization where scientific racism would thrive, designed to prove that blacks were inferior.

In the utopia the colonial project envisioned, Kenyans would always be at the bottom of the social pyramid, with whites at the very top, and Asians in the middle as a buffer. But because Kenya attracted the British aristocracy, the class element was also important to the immigration policy regarding poor whites who were seen as undesirable. With hordes of eugenicists driving the colonial project, their ideas on class and social control infused themselves into the colonies in such core ways that they never left.

In July 1933, 60 white men and women gathered in a boardroom at the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi. Among them were medical doctors, executives, government officials, journalists, scientists and other prominent white people. There were also a few Indians in the room. Their common goal was to formalize a eugenics group that ended up with the lengthy name Kenya Society for the Study of Race Improvement (KSSRI).

Of the 60 people in that room, two emerged as the mouthpieces of the group. Henry Gordon and Dr FW Vint were both medical doctors who tried to use science to prove that whites are superior by nature. This was already at the core of the eugenics movement, but in Kenya it was only one part of the core structures of colonialism, which were built on the similar concept of "the white man's burden". Gordon was in charge of Mathari Mental Hospital, the only mental health institution in the country at the time. Even within the institution—established in 1910 as the Lunatic Asylum—access to facilities had always been segregated on the basis of race. Kenyans occupied the worst facilities in the 675-bed hospital, and Europeans the best. Up until the 1960s, all the members of the medical staff were European.

One of the main motivations behind the formation of the KSSRI was the growing clamour for better education for Kenyans.

While the group included people from many backgrounds and professions, it was medical science that provided it with the most potent propaganda; the group's vice chairman was Dr James Sequeira, who was also the editor of the influential East African Medical Journal. The dominance of medical science and pseudo-science in Kenya's eugenics movement was a result of the growth of British medical care in Kenya in the 1920s, as white doctors became essential to keeping Africans healthy so they could work for settlers and pay taxes.

In Race and Empire: Eugenics in Colonial Kenya, Chloe Campbell explores how Gordon and Vint used science to try and prove that Kenyans did not possess sufficient innate mental capacity and hence should not be educated at the same level as their European colonizers. In one study, Gordon studied 219 Kenyan boys housed at the Kabete Reformatory. He concluded that 86 per cent suffered mental conditions, but even the rest couldn't be considered okay without creating several grades of "European ideas of normality".

In another study, Gordon tested 278 Kenyans—112 of whom had already been diagnosed with mental illness—for the venereal disease syphilis. When he found that more than half the group with mental conditions suffered from the disease, he concluded that it was the racial differences, and not the social and economic differences in the new colony, that caused the disparity.

This particular argument was not new; in a 1905 book, a settler had blamed Indians and Swahilis for the rise of venereal diseases in Kenya. He’d offered that "the healthiness of a place is greatly increased by not allowing any native habitations within a given distance of the white settlement".

As a government pathologist, Vint focused his studies on correlating skull size with intelligence. He studied 100 skulls and arrived at the conclusion that Kenyans had lighter skulls and smaller pyramidal cells. In 1934, he concluded that Kenyan brains could not grow past the age of 18 years, and that they started decreasing in size after that. That was the same year primary education became mandatory for white children, while investments in the education of African children remained paltry. Vint's work was meant to prove that there was no need of educating Kenyans because they did not have the capacity to grasp complex concepts.

After Gordon wrote about some of their findings in The Times, Louis Leakey responded with a letter attacking their methods and their conclusions, but not their premise. Instead, the Kenyan-born anthropologist argued, the feeble mindedness of the "African mind" should be attributed to "the lack of stimulation in the normal conditions of African life and to the fact that sexual activity began at a younger age, somehow inhibiting mental development," Campbell writes.

Beyond the pre-existing issues with race, there had been another more immediate reason for the formation of the KSSRI in 1933. Just a few months before, the colonial government had hanged a 19-year-old white man, Charles William Ross, for the brutal murders of two young white women. Ross, who was born in Kenya, had killed the two women, thrown one body in the Menengai crater, and left the other at the top. As part of Ross's defence, Gordon used an X-ray photograph of Ross's skull to assert that he was criminally-liable because of "pronounced mental instability" that placed him somewhere between "feeble-minded" and "moral-deficient." He was found guilty anyway, and hanged on 11 January 1933.

This were the same explanations Gordon and other psychiatrists applied to the entirety of the black Kenyan population, more so when they were involved in crime.

With the economic depression of the 1920s and the increasing education of Kenyans, crime rates had shot up in urban areas. Juvenile delinquency was of particular interest, and Gordon would go on to claim that the majority among his subjects in the study at Kabete had some education. The point was that they had been overwhelmed by British education. This was the "feeble-minded" argument, which also drove racially-motivated policies in the economy, healthcare and other facets of life, including the justice system. From the outset, the colonial system had set to educate Kenyans to be church-going technical workers and manual labourers, not free-thinking intellectuals.

The parliamentary discussion on the law that made sexual assault a capital offense laboured on whether it should be applied to non-Kenyans as well.

Interestingly, eugenicists also considered urbanisation to be one of the reasons for the increase in crime and psychiatric cases. In their thinking, urbanisation "detribalised the African and made him unmanageable". It was part of the thinking that the African mind simply couldn't handle too much change because it was not genetically wired to do so. Change destabilised their feeble minds and led them to crazy thoughts that they could ever upend the social pyramid. This thinking preceded and survived the official eugenics movement in Kenya which lasted from 1930 to 1937.

On the Christmas Eve of 1911, for example, the Machakos district commissioner wrote a lengthy report on "the mania of 1911". It was the story of Siotune Kathuke and Kiamba Mutuaovio, who had led several acts of rebellion. Their sermons had supposedly inspired a widespread mania, as more people began to question the ordained order of things. Another good example is the commitment of Elijah Masinde, the founder of Dini ya Msambwa, in 1945. He was committed at Mathari for pretty much the same reasons that Siotune and Kiamba were exiled to the coast. When he was released in 1947, Masinde promptly went back to preaching the end of white rule.

Campbell notes that although the government didn't fund the eugenicists’ work or officially base its policies on their work, it showed its support in other ways. One was the continued underdevelopment of Kenyans, and the other was more subtle, like giving Gordon a three-month leave from his work to go and try to win support from other eugenicists in London. The members of the KSSRI were also well connected; shortly after they founded the organisation, a group of them went to a ball held at Government House (now State House), which is the opening scene in Campbell's book. But the movement could not have chosen a worse time to try to push for eugenics, as Hitler's Nazi Germany employed similar ideas to devastating effects. Thus, the prominence of eugenicists in Britain and in colonies like Kenya diminished in the late 1930s for political reasons, but the ideas survived.

Another prominent figure in the pseudo-science of "African intelligence" was a retired doctor called JC Carothers, who succeeded Gordon at Mathari. He had submitted a widely-read paper on African intelligence to the World Health Organization when the colonial government turned to him to write what became "The Psychology of the Mau Mau". Published in 1954, the report shows a slight change in the racist perspective regarding African intelligence. Where Gordon had focused on biology alone, Carothers expanded his scope to include environmental issues.

In resisting a common electoral roll, settlers argued that it was unfair to be forced to wait for Kenyans to catch up on the civilisation scale.

Turning his focus to the Kikuyu, who made up the majority of the Mau Mau ranks, Carothers thought that since the Kikuyu had had greater contact with their colonizers, "Kikuyu men have envied this power, not unnaturally, and have tried to capture it by learning." Kikuyu women were not part of this because Carothers thought that "Her life … has suffered little change," that her focus was still on agriculture and child-bearing, meaning she had lost her men who "have found themselves with money and powers which have virtually turned their heads. Power has come quickly to folk who are not … familiar with it". These were Gordon's ideas, with a dash of flair and some added flavour.

Louis Leakey was another instrumental scientist in that decade, helping counter-insurgency efforts in many ways. His best known effort was on oathing, arguing that the Mau Mau was led by brilliant psychopaths who had changed the oath's meaning and even particulars. His counter-insurgency research and work may have actually escalated the war in 1952, which was one of his goals. Leakey thought that if he made the problem big enough, then it could be quickly addressed. He used his personal and anthropological knowledge of Kikuyu culture to devise a counter-oath that would free those who had taken the Mau Mau oath, and was core to the psychological counter-insurgency.

While eugenics concepts did not directly shape policy, they formed a part of the larger racist ideologies that informed many laws of the colonial era, a good number of which survive to date. They were notoriously anti-poor and anti-Kenyan, offering tokenism and hiding behind legalese. The Witchcraft Act, for example, banned many cultural practices by purporting to regulate them. It even made it an offence to pretend to be a witchdoctor.

After independence, the power and social dynamics espoused by racism switched back to class their roots, this time driven by a black, mostly Western-educated elite. The White Highlands went to a new class of supremacists, who quickly passed the Vagrancy Act in 1968. Under this law, you could be arrested and placed in a rehabilitation home if you were found walking in a posh estate with no money in your pocket and no known source of income. The Act had existed as the Vagrancy Regulations in the colonial system, only to be formalized when Kenyan elites started replacing settlers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it survived in our laws until it was repealed in 1997.

Using the lessons learned during the decade of the Mau Mau war, the new government launched a similar counter-insurgency against a secessionist movement in Northern Kenya. The model of brutality, concentration camps and spirited propaganda fit in the ’60s as it had in the ’50s, with added efficiency.

Combined with other laws and institutions such as the police, the colonial view of the base of the pyramid survives. It is why the introduction of free primary education and maternity healthcare as public goods was such a big deal. Pro-poor policies have surprisingly been few in independent Kenya as an African elite only sought to replace, not displace, the colonial order. The paternalistic relationship between the individual and the state is still intact, as becomes clear whenever there is an internal threat to social order.

The forced sterilizations report points to how institutionalised eugenics survives. They were happening with tacit government approval, and targeted a class of "undesirables". The sterilizations probably thrived in the first decade of HIV/AIDS in Kenya when there was official and social denial of the extent of the problem. We might never know their true extent, although a few of the institutions named in the report should not come as a surprise.

Pro-poor policies have surprisingly been few in independent Kenya as an African elite only sought to replace, not displace, the colonial order.

One is Marie Stopes International, named for British author Marie Stopes. While Stopes is today regarded as a feminist pioneer, the major driving aspect of her birth-control advocacy was eugenics and not women's rights. Her ideas about the poor are particularly worrying, as that is whom her clinics targeted from the onset. She was a lifelong eugenicist, who even disinherited her son Harry because he married a short-sighted woman. The other institutions named in the report—government hospitals—are still wallowing in under-investment and neglect.

Infused in post-colonial Kenya was not eugenics as a concept, but as a form of social control. It is many other things now by many other names, but it seems focused on further impoverishing those who are already poor while enriching those already endowed. A few might cross that socioeconomic divide, but many never will.

Digital programs come with templates and precast straitjackets that result in depictions of traditional and cultural diversity that are inauthentic and historically inaccurate.

Published

on

By

Somewhere between 2007 and 2012 Kenya underwent a symbolic transition—from analogue to digital. Comedian Smart Joker became the spokesperson for this transition. It was funny that a jester who amplified the confused-villager-in-the-city motif, the staple of Kenyan comedy, was the one declaring that Kenya had migrated to the digital world. A utopia. The rap verses in his song Tumetoka Analogue Tuko Digital referenced MPesa and mobile phones. Kenya had entered the digital age under the Silicon Savannah moniker. Internet infrastructure was rapidly expanding, cheap internet, the advent of social media and the growing ubiquity of smartphones made 2010 a critical turning point not just for Kenya but for the world. Edward Mendelson even said, "Human character changed on or about December 2010, when everyone, it seemed, started carrying a smartphone."

In this digital transition, one of the fundamental changes was how Kenya engaged with itself and the manner in which Kenyans experienced themselves and each other. #KOT was born and thrived.

Some interesting things are happening on the cultural front. In Kenya the use of design software technologies is being used to metamorphosize oral stories into online legends. Vast digital landscapes have been brought to the fore where old depictions are being reimagined; cue the Afro-future genre where Maasais are imagined in space sitting atop alien disks, and Afrobubblegum, which celebrates itself for being fun, fierce and frivolous. Films that disrupt colonial narrative structures and depictions have been made, traditional settings have been incorporated into online games while traditional board games are being digitised. Beyond making Kenyan (hi)stories accessible, however, a critical examination of the affordances and limitations of the digital space is needed, especially in terms of authenticity, diversity and complexity in representation.

Technology is spoken of in heraldic, near-biblical terms, a promised land where a techno-fix will provide correction for all past narratives, attitudes and inefficiencies. The general assumption is that the adoption of digital technologies will solve deep-rooted inequalities and speedily remove structural barriers. In some cases, political problems are being surrendered to technical solutions. This attitude ignores the fact that technology integrates assumptions and preferences about culture, places, people and values and that it can reproduce and reinforce inequities and lead to new forms of dispossession. Caution against such unchecked hopes has been voiced but the debate regarding the finer details of this analogue-digital migration is confined to tiny circles of experts.

There was something disquieting about the frenetic pace of the analogue-to-digital migration. It was more than the basic burden of migratory logistics. A country like Kenya came to technology with a certain mind-set and the technologies being adopted also came with their baggage of bias and assumptions. Simply adopting or merely imitating how others were using them was not going to work. Some habits have to go, some new ones have to be adopted; success in the digital age comes in iterative baby steps not in the rushed manner in which certain projects have been undertaken. The movers, the systems that allowed the migrations, were all borrowed. Certain cultural and imaginative needs of the people were missing from the existing technologies and had to be built from scratch.

On the cultural and heritage fronts, the debates around digitization have thrown up interesting dilemmas. The events that whisk us from the digital optimism of the early 2010s to the digital cultural depictions of the 2020s are many and follow many threads. They all begin offline, with good intentions and a clear need to meet, a remedy to apply or an aspect of society to include. Measures are then put in place. Take the question of national heroes and memorialization. In 2007, the Ministry of Sports, Culture and Heritage set up a Taskforce on National Heroes and Heroines whose mandate was "countrywide data collection on criteria and modalities of honoring national heroes and heroines". After five months the taskforce came out with a report that, among other things, identified the modalities of scoring and awarding hero points. The report of the taskforce reads like propaganda designed to turn citizens into loyal nationalists:

"The national heroes and heroines square should be the highest symbol and point of reference of the perpetuity of our nationhood. It should represent and depict the national core values, goals and principles to which all Kenyans aspire. The place should symbolize all the shrines held sacred by various Kenyan communities. It should be a place revered and treated with utmost respect by those who work, enter and visit the square. As a national shrine it should embody the country's pride, hope, spiritual and cultural aspirations and national unity. This concept should be reflected in the architectural design, management and administration of the square."

In short, the manufacture of a holy shrine that, by existing, induces nostalgia, pride, and a deeply symbolic respect for Project Kenya; an Arcadia of sorts, Kenya's own Shangri La where memories of heroes and heroines live on forever.

Now take this intention, add a software programme and unchecked and uncritical enthusiasm, bring in the National Museums of Kenya, add tracts of digital real estate through the Google Arts and Culture Project, stir for a few years then add frames and the perfect Kenyan heroes soup is ready for serving up on a digital platter. This is what happened recently when Kenya National Museums—through the Google Arts and Culture Project—embarked on a project similar to the watercolour sketches of Kenyan men and women commissioned from Joy Adamson by the British colonial government in the 1950s.

The general assumption is that the adoption of digital technologies will solve deep-rooted global inequalities and speedily remove structural barriers.

The project is described on the Google Arts and Culture page as a celebration of "a journey of 400 years of history and geography" and we are invited to "meet 61 historic heroes of the Kenyan communities" and engage in their "remarkable stories". The heroes are given zoomorphic qualities: "Speed of a cheetah, agility of a cobra, strength of a rhino". In almost all of them, a simplistic macho effect is achieved through creased brows. And they are inspired by the erroneous official simplification that "Kenya has 44 communities who all have heroes" in a move to make culture, diversity, identity history and even pride accessible and available for display. A gamified section invites us to "discover your super alter-Ego" by "taking a quiz".

Mukudi Okwaro Nyabondo (Nichola)

The digitally imagined Chief Mukudi adorned in ostrich feathers and the offline analogue reality of the late chief adorned in Mumia Kingdom's official kanzu, black coat and king's medals.

The digitally imagined Chief Mukudi adorned in ostrich feathers and the offline analogue reality of the late chief adorned in Mumia Kingdom's official kanzu, black coat and king's medals.

This fantastical rendering of Chief Mukudi psychically displaces and forces one to think at once that there was an ancient civilization and that the many marks on his body held mysterious powers. Nostalgia for a fictionalized past looms large in this cartoonish idiocy.

It becomes even harder to look beyond these aesthetic distortions to consider and appreciate the effort put into the project since the aesthetic style erases and overshadows the substance of the stories. This leads to an alienating abstraction of reality.

In moves only possible in the digital space, the project also allows for an immense lore dump. We are not allowed to move gradually through each hero but are forced to contend with tens of heroes and heroines from diverse cultures in an undifferentiated mass in the virtual world. The project is both a product of the internet age and the shortcomings of the software and codes that power it.

The project achieves two things: Firstly, it is a symbolic reversal of the manner in which Kenya has approached the controversial question of who is to be celebrated and how. Secondly, it is a celebration of diverse traditional oral stories that further complicates the foundational stories of this country.

The report of the taskforce reads like propaganda designed to turn citizens into loyal nationalists.

But the actual product falls short of these intentions because the images shown on the Google Arts and Culture Project depict people who individually and collectively seem to emerge from an aesthetic, curatorial, cultural, political and artistic vacuum into the ready straitjacket templates of Hollywood and the digital age. The cartoonified heroes seem to be dying for a representation that will portray them in a positive light and release them from the heathen cells into which they had been locked for decades by colonial superstructures, laws, policies and attitudes.

Even though this project tries to bring a conceptual shift, its lynchpin is simplistic and flawed. Tinkering with and tweaking the diverse Kenyan cultural heritage in this simplistic manner was never going to bring successful reversals to the old prejudiced attitudes. There is no power or heroism in the depictions of the paused agile leap or the ready-to-pounce poses. This is not a digital revolution overturning old conceptions but a further distortion of reality. A phoney simulation.

To escape from that nativist prison is not possible with Western media and software, and vector elements and stock images conceived in Silicon Valley. Ancient lore can be repurposed for modern digital needs but if it is used to serve narrow nationalistic agendas, a mutually reinforcing and equally destructive process is embarked upon—national image-making on a straitjacket platform.

For a country in search of sources of pride, anything seems to go in reconciling the disparate narratives of national being and becoming. Historical inaccuracies are embraced, regional characters are incorporated without qualms. The mad Mullah can be passed as a Kenyan hero as the stories cross ethnic, cultural and geographical boundaries and vault over their rural origins, acquiring a transcendental quality.

The pastoral 13th-17th century Ajuran sultanate is accessorised, ignorantly, with Mediterranean marble pillars. Its "hero" is an ascending figure bathed in light, holding a sword, and wrapped up like a Tuareg dervish straight from a teenager's dream in an Ibrahim Al-Koni novel. Moving towards Southern Ethiopia, the almost 600-year-old Borana governance institution of the Gada—that from 1548 has had 72 Aba Gadas—is represented by one image titled Aba Gada; his name and the years of his reign are surplus to the needs of Kenya National Museums.

Some heroes and their stories are asynchronous to their actual histories. Take for example the story of Kote Golo who is depicted as a young Rendille moran. A respected Sakuye elder says that he died in 1913 but KNM places Kote Golo's stories in the 1930s and beyond. What are we to make of references to Cuban and Soviet Union support? And the Ogaden war? A lone ranger's story created by KNM.

The heroes are given zoomorphic qualities: "Speed of a cheetah, agility of a cobra, strength of a rhino."

In this project fictive kinship is conjured at will. The Burji for example, are depicted as "farmers of the desert" even though they are not found in any desert. Their mythical story of origin has villains who shift according to the prevailing relationship or the needs of the narrator. The Burji, Konso and Borana are distinct and unrelated and passing them off as cousins or "the three brothers" is careless. KNM erroneously claims that, "The Burji swore to be farmers, to feed the Borana who had chased them away from Liban, with grains of life."

Kenya National Museums wants to force the stories to triumph over structural issues and vault above politics, above economics and above context. Women are depicted as hormonal, men are gladiators. The project is largely an attempt to apply heavy nationalist makeup but the anachronistic collapse and fictional rendering fail to achieve the attempted nationalistic unification. Such stories, if not told in all their different dimensions, are best left alone.

The traditional myths and legends being rescued and bathed in gold and light have been imbued with Western superhero motifs. Most of the images have gilded renderings, the avatars have dead-set serious eyes and flawlessly toned bodies.

Traditional costumes have been wilfully replaced with the accoutrements of heroes of Western heritage and the digital bric-a-brac of online game cultures and depictions of power that borrow trinkets and magical orbs and wands from Harry Potter movies. There are other related accoutrements of this world such as fancy swords and blazing spears. A proper scrutiny of the images may even reveal Black Panther's vibranium hammers.

To suture the resulting inconsistencies and to imbue them with digital depictions of power, the project bathes everything in neon lights of a golden hue and streaks of lightning. Depictions from Greek mythology and those in the Kenyan heroes project are so similar that one could conclude that Zeus no longer reigned from Mt. Olympus and had allowed his energy of lights to be borrowed for use in the digital afterlife of Kenyan oral stories. Mekatilili wa Menza could pass for Hera.

Historical narratives are often complicated, and bear the contradictions of reality. The process by which real people are turned into comic book heroes, shorn of all historical and cultural realities, has been enabled by the enthusiastic use of digital tools and existing digital templates and environment; this carries some of the blame for the iconographic distortions.

Nationalistic self-flattery goes through many layers of bureaucratic approval that all carry the blame for the historical inaccuracies in this project: the funders, the cast of actors that include the heritage minister, and the president who gave it the full blessing of the state. The project has an impressive-sounding list of contributors—Director General, senior curators and research scientists, designers, archivists, photographers and marketers—some of whom have PhDs to their names.

The project is both a product of the internet age and the shortcomings of the software and codes that power it.

Kenya National Museums is not a stranger to Kenyans and has people capable of a nuanced preservation and depiction of cultures in their full, authentic complexity. That they did not see the fundamental problems with this project demonstrates either wilful ignorance or vested interests with regards to the project funds.

Nothing, not even the desperate drive to reinvent KNM, justifies this level of distortion and and show of disrespect to Kenyan communities. The difficult question of national culture cannot be answered through a linear rendering of history, culture and identity. This refashioning of cultural identities and collapsing of individual uniqueness into a national whole with a homogeneous past only creates a mess. Even when midwifed by Google or the mimicked aesthetics, it is bereft of the true body and material cultures of the depicted communities. When not attempting to create this narrow nationalism, Kenya's heritage department seems preoccupied with how to add value or use the cultural heritage of Kenya's communities for some form of economic gain; packaged and ready for investors and tourists. This project is the latest attempt to turn heritage and the diverse cultures into digital cultural capital.

The museum has an impressive collection of material culture. But in this Google Arts and Culture Project, everything is everywhere. The head gear of community X adorns community Y. Things are interchangeable and decontextualized.

These concerns are directed at software designers and at the cultural enthusiasts feeding in instructions into the software to remedy old questions of identity. But the institution that brings together unchecked enthusiasm and flawed programs without care for safeguarding measures carries the bulk of the blame.

Digital programs come with templates and precast straitjackets that often do not have—especially in slack, inexperienced hands—the manoeuvrability needed for accurate depictions. To use Western tools to fight old imperial framing needs other supportive industries where items like free and diverse stock photos, digital elements and assets can be sourced. Digital platforms where African and traditional material cultures can be found need to be set up.

I spoke to graphic designers who all contend with the lack of the tools and elements necessary to ease their work. "Sometimes what is in the mind and what comes out of a design process are miles apart," says George Ngechu, founder of Sura Images, a stock image agency whose platform is designed to provide cheap and accessible images of anything from well-adjusted Africans in the workspace to basic material culture. "We get a lot of queries for a diverse range of images; the demand is a lot but we can't meet it".

There are few high resolution images for their use and even those that are available are watermarked or ridiculously expensive. Designers have to resort to paid stock image sites or render their own images, a painstakingly slow process that involves finding models and photographers, organising a shoot, editing and then embarking on designing a small poster depicting the realities of their surroundings. Those who commission the design do not understand that this leads to a borrowed, virtual aesthetic.

"If you search for stock pictures of Africans doing anything you won't find them easily," says Job, a graphic designer with a local newspaper. "Search, for example, for an African couple having dinner and you will struggle. But when you look for just ‘couples having dinner’, a million images of white people are available and for free."

The images shown on the Google Arts and Culture Project depict people who individually and collectively seem to emerge from an aesthetic, curatorial, cultural, political and artistic vacuum.

I talk to Chief Mukudi's great-grandson, a journalist and designer, and we laugh at the image of his great-grandfather. He too acknowledges the challenge in the hands of the designers. "One time I was designing a campaign poster that needed to have a broom in it. All the vectors I got were the witch brooms, I had to go find a broom and make it usable for my needs".

It takes immense effort and work for a designer to find basic things like akala sandals, brooms, guards, traditional cooking pots or any other commonly available item of material culture on the internet.

"You know, the majority of Kenyans assume that beads are the same. We do not know that they contain important cultural meaning. And also, since we do not have reference points, we approximate or just round off to the nearest item available … If your community isn't serious in putting itself in the digital space, the distortions, misrepresentations and being left out is inevitable," says Job.

Digital products have to be groundtruthed yet the data available for the production of the necessary traditional materials is from stereotyped tropes—borrowed, inauthentic simulations or low quality. It is even difficult to crowdsource such elements because, as one of the designers said, "Designers on the continent are not producers but consumers." The need to contribute to platforms where stock images and vectors are stored was mentioned by many of the designers I spoke to but Joe Nzomo says, "So far, even when you want to donate some of those vectors or elements, there are no ready platforms to share them on."

There are ongoing conversations that try to solve this problem by establishing platforms with African material culture assets, elements and stock images such as Picha Stock, the previously mentioned Sura Images, and Leso Stories’ digital asset library.

Leso Stories, for example, uses technology to give an immersive storytelling experience and notes that interactivity is a "key ingredient missing from even the best books or adaptations of African cultural works". The platform has taken "fundamental care to ensure that not only the storyteller but also the storytelling environment are all authentic and faithful to when, where, how and why these stories are shared." Leso Stories has managed to achieve this through "Virtual Humans" or what they call Embodied Conversational Agents. However, Leso Stories’ revolutionary contribution is creating 3D models and digital assets to be used by other creators. It is one way to counter the domination of Western digital vectors.

The key lesson for us from Leso Stories’ digital asset library, Picha Stock and Sura Images is that technology demands the efforts of individuals who have foresight and passion to effect change. But the support of institutions and the responsibility of those in positions of power are necessary. The institutions at the heart of such efforts like KNM and even global players like Google and stock image behemoths like Getty and Shutterstock have a responsibility for inclusive and accurate cultural depictions.

The true power of traditional symbols of power lies in their proper, respectful and contextual depictions. To help designers and creators, the KNM could have digitised the many items that are stored and displayed in highly colonial forms at the Nairobi archives. Maybe then Harry Potter wands and magical orbs would not be as ubiquitous as they are in the Shujaa project.

Leso Stories is bold and has reimagined how African oral stories can be told without losing their participatory elements.

From production to consumption, the levels at which we have to engage with the use of software are various. In the artificial digital domain, the use of technology has to be groundtruthed. Digital technologies and software are mediums of an unequal power relationship. What is visible online as vectors is mirrored offline by beads, shawls and bakoras. Their enthusiastic adoption needs to strike a balance between prioritising faithfulness and awareness of what might be gained or lost in the cultural translation of oral, contested, continuous, cultural and non-linear histories into permanent, one-dimensional inauthentic and simple depictions.

Fidelity to the truth is key and it cannot be achieved by hurried half-commitments.

When kids who have grown up on comic vines like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Star Wars turn their gaze from the marvel universe to their environment and search for such characters, they have no tools to analyse, appreciate or objectively appraise their own body cultures, legends, and myths.

In the age of artificial intelligence where simple text prompts and instructions can generate cultural images, the problem of authenticity and complexity is further compounded.

Let us for a brief moment turn to the judgment of the crowd of consumers. Take my friend Basele, a techie and digital enthusiast who shared on This is Africa's Twitter page text-generated images that he had made on an AI platform—three images necessary for our appraisal of digital depictions.

"So far, even when you want to donate some of those vectors or elements, there are no ready platforms to share them on."

Basele used the text prompt "Calm and colourful image of a Samburu girl from Norther Kenya" and this is the image that the AI platform generated.

Basele used the text prompt "Calm and colourful image of a Samburu girl from Norther Kenya" and this is the image that the AI platform generated.

In Laisamis, the possible home of this digitally rendered cultural "calm and colourful" image, I show the AI mage to two friends and I ask for their reaction. One of the two is an anthropologist. He looks at the image, immediately notes that the lady is adorned with, among other things, "ostrich egg shells" and "modern earrings". With confusion on his face, he asks, "Could she be Pokot?" Even the distant similarity to Lupita Nyong’o lurking in the image doesn't help the image to pass the cultural authenticity test.

Here Basele has used AI to generate a "calm and colourful image of a Rendille girl from Northern Kenya."

My friends compare the nose size with a standard Rendille nose and laugh. But what does the software know? In a third image my friend sent me, the lady has aluminium beads and modern earrings. "Which culture is this?" ask my friends in Laisamis.

The anthropologist in Laisamis says, "The pastoralists’ material culture is lean," noting that it has to be very sparse and specific: "Remember you carry everything with you."

But with my friend's curious commands, even with the AI-generated artificial glow and flawless skin, the images do not pass the authenticity test. It is not satire, it is not caricature. These are the depictions of soulless machines.

More worrying, however, are the high stakes and high risks produced by the fact that such AI-generated depictions are being used in videos to tell oral stories. Their simplistic rendering becomes embedded in other AI platforms where they are used as the groundtruth for further and future AI work. A self-reinforcing loop of distortion.

Kunta Content, a Kenyan online gaming company, has created a Maasai hero named Hiru. In the game trailer, a Maasai village is depicted well and the landscape is accurate. But Hiru is shown always running, killing a lion within the short two minutes of the trailer. In another trailer, he he kills a poacher armed only with a bow and arrow. Huri has no grace, he is a white commando in a Maasai shuka. At their heart the codes that run him are the same ones that are powering the Western gaming industry. An anomaly with the story is the traditional gaming industry villain, a slayer bearing two massive axes who is taken down by the dextrous manoeuvre of Hiru's spear, which is held and used like a cane. Salim, Kunta Content's creator, describes the merger of media and gaming as "old storytelling which tries to tell an experience, an emotion".

Digital inclusion needs more than design sensibility to obtain accurate and complex depictions. Other aspects such as an understanding of history, awareness of forms of self-depiction, a grasp of design tools, an honest imagination, understanding language and the power of stories, some anthropological depth, a sense of geography and an appreciation of cultures and spirituality need to be in place. These are not only to be considered but they need to be actively cultivated and implemented. An assemblage of supporting and intersectional expertise such as writers, designers and critics, as well as platforms for dissemination like the Internet, television, books and, most importantly, the resources to undertake the necessary iterative experimentation and learning have to be availed.

Kenya's culture and heritage ministry is encouraging communities to compile, document and register their traditional knowledge. As heritage officials from the ministry traverse the country facilitating this rush to develop biocultural protocols, the question of the technology behind them has not been fully considered. So far, the discussions seem to be centred around traditional attire, food, herbal medicine, heritage sites, rites of passage, and so on and so forth. The intention is to codify and keep traditional knowledge in a database somewhere where it will be stored for eternity and where communities can access it with just a few clicks.

He has no grace, he is a white commando in a Maasai shuka.

But we must not forget that dispossession and exploitation have often been a deliberately baked-in problem. The risk with such databases lies in the fact that entire communities’ traditional knowledge can be erased from such systems or replaced without consequence. Aside from structural issues like software developer bias that can show up in their codes or the risk of hackers, the whole idea is foreign and is not how cultures engage with their heritage.

The above efforts to bring traditional African cultures into the digital space seem to be simulations of what authentic pre-colonial traditional backgrounds should look like; in South Africa, experiments at 3D oral storytelling were set inside a cave. Their intention is almost always to preserve a fast-disappearing heritage. The inclusion of ambient audio sounds like chirping birds, lowing cows and crowing cocks don't guarantee their integrity. The villages shown are untouched even by such simple "technology" as iron sheet roofs, yet Kenyan villages today are places where solar lights, mobile phones, plastic water Jerry cans, radios and even TVs compete for visibility with shukas and lesos.

Aside from the structural issues, the idea of taking and storing is colonial and is not how cultures engage with their heritage.

Digital space and technology is a transitional medium that can evolve into a space of shared memory. As it is currently instituted, however, it has major limitations in depicting the rich African cultural tapestries. So far, the depictions of traditional and cultural diversity are inauthentic and historically inaccurate. The portrayals of complex diversity, nationhood and even conflict are problematic.

It is not easy to encapsulate the precise role played by the Kenya National Museums in Kenyan public life. However, as enthusiasm for the heritage industry grows, more than any other institution, KNM offers a chance to meet its needs. But to do this, it needs to go through a phase of introspection and to rethink its role.

To tackle the inaccuracies and elisions of African material cultures from the digital space, efforts are necessary from several fronts: individual artists, institutional commitments and the design of the technology itself. This should be a serious and deliberate endeavour as the risks of reanimating colonial logics of extraction and over-simplification lie in wait.

How Bureaucracy Is Locking Kenya Out of Transshipment Business

Pattern of Life and Death: Camp Simba and the US War on Terror

Davido's Timeless Misses the Dial

The Continued Relevance of Pan-African Marxism in a Time of Crisis

Samir Amin's Radical Political Economy

Kenyan Digital Avatars: Cartoonification of Culture and Heritage

The Dictatorship of the Church

Race and Empire: How Scientific Racism Shaped Kenya