Heterosexual Kenyan men are unhappy and they are desperately looking for explanations for the impasses they find themselves in financially, socially, and with regard to their relationships with women.
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Women are the reason why men have changed because women are hard on men. […] The expectations they come with into a relationship, and generally how they have been brought up, or the life they live, that is what gives some men stress. […] When someone is living with a woman in the house, you find that issues are many because money is little.
Wellington Ochieng, 36-year old labour migrant from western Kenya
During almost three years of ethnographic fieldwork among male migrants in Pipeline, an over-populated high-rise estate in Nairobi’s chronically marginalised east, I heard complaints like Wellington’s almost daily. Migrant men, in my case predominantly Luo men from western Kenya who came to Nairobi with high expectations of a better future, bemoaned a life full of pressure caused by the romantic, sexual, and economic expectations of their girlfriends, wives, and rural kin. The blame often lay on “city girls” who were portrayed as materialistic “slay queens” who “finish” men by leaving them bankrupt only to suck away the next sponsor’s wealth after grabbing him with their “Beelzebub nails”, as Wellington called the colourful nails sported by many Nairobi women. Soon, so a fear repeatedly expressed by my interlocutors, most men would no longer be needed at all and Kenya’s economy would be ruled by economically powerful women who raise chaotic boys brought up without an authoritative father figure. Such fears of male expendability also manifested in imaginations about a future in which more and more men and women would live in homosexual relationships or “contract marriages” that replace trust and love with contractual agreements. Once, on his way back to our shared apartment, my flatmate Samuel—a student of economics who is divorced from the mother of his baby son—passed a neighbour’s house where a group of women were celebrating a birthday. He shook his head and sighed: “We live like animals in the jungle. Women and men separately. We only meet for mating and making babies. Maybe that’s where we’re heading to.”
Overwhelmed by their wives’ and girlfriends’ expectations, many migrant men who spoke to me in Pipeline had decided to spend as little time as possible in their marital houses. Instead, they evaded pressure by lifting weights in gyms, stockpiling digital loans and informal credits, placing bets in gambling shops, gulping down a cold beer in a Wines & Spirits, playing FIFA videogames, or catcalling “brown-skinned” Kamba women on the roads. Some men who could no longer cope took even more drastic measures involving murder and suicide. One man cut his girlfriend’s throat and tried to kill himself, while another tried to poison himself, later quoting his wife’s actions and character as the reason for his attempted suicide. Anything appeared better than spending time with the “daughters of Jezebel” who were waiting for them in the cramped houses of Pipeline, sometimes demanding that they engage in romantic and sexual practices they were unfamiliar with, as expounded upon by Wellington:
“When you come to Nairobi, our girls want that you hold her hand when you are going to buy chips, you hug her when you are going to the house, I hear there is something called cuddling, she wants that you cuddle, at what time will you cuddle and tomorrow you want to go to work early? […] you don’t go to meet your friends so that you show her you love her, you just sleep on the sofa and caress her hair. To me this is nonsense because that is not romantic love. I think that romantic love, so long as I provide the things I provide, and we sire children, I think that’s enough romance. […] Another girl told me to lick her, and I asked her ‘Why do you want me to lick you?’ She said that she wanted me to lick her private parts. Are those places licked? […] Those things are things that people see on TV, let us leave them to the people on TV.”
The burden of economic and sexual performance was not only felt by poorer migrant men, however. Rather, as shown by articles in Kenyan newspapers (see, for example, here and here), it is a nationwide pandemic affecting men from different classes. On a two-day-long men’s meeting on the slopes of Mt. Kenya in mid-2022 which I attended and which was organized by Chomba Njoka and the self-help book authors and masculinity consultants Silas Nyanchwani and Jacob Aliet, for instance, a male lawyer, a psychologist, and a land surveyor, among others, lamented about similar issues. Sitting around a bonfire drinking cold beer in the damp cold of Mt. Kenya, one man after another told a story about a girlfriend who cheated with a financially better-off man, a wife who emptied the marital home of all valuables and left with the children, or young women who come to Nairobi to be seduced by the city’s material promises and men in suits with “deep pockets” who flock the bars of places like Pipeline looking for teenage girls with dreams of big cars, shiny clothes, and expensive hair pieces. Initially the stories were told hesitantly; one could feel that the men telling them were afraid to be blamed. Was I not man enough to provide for a family? Was I responsible for my wife leaving me? But more and more of the men present told similar stories, cathartic laughter breaking out after yet another man narrated a ridiculous incident in his life. Maybe, we began to think, it was not our fault. But whose fault was it then?
“Nairobian girls, man, acha tu (Kiswahili, “just leave it”)! If some hapless guy with disposable income and sensible behaviour shows some interest, the girl will put her acting mask on, and can easily fool the man proper. Nothing wrong with that, as life is a game. You play. They play. We play each other”, writes Nyanchwani in his book 50 Memos to Men, a collection of his Facebook posts on gender relations in contemporary Nairobi. When I first met Silas in a café in Nairobi’s central business district, a calm and soft-spoken guy over six feet tall and father of a girl, he told me that men had been left behind in Kenya’s economic and cultural development of the last two decades, perpetuating local discourses about the “neglect of the boychild”. Most development aid interventions were targeting the girlchild, and women were increasingly empowered economically. Who, however, was there to tell men what to do, to give men a voice and guidance? Aliet, an imposing man with an authoritative appearance, shared Nyanchwani’s sentiments. Known as a writer of Sci-Fi novels, Aliet decided to write his book Unplugged: Things our fathers did not tell us after many of his male friends had shared stories with him about the pressure to provide, the burden of performance, women’s ungratefulness, and men’s inability to know how to respond to what women and society demands of them. If the raving reviews by both men and women on the homepage of the Nuria bookstore are anything to go by, the book has helped many male readers to find relief and new hope by receiving guidance on what it means to be a man in contemporary Kenya.
But more and more of the men present told similar stories, cathartic laughter breaking out after yet another man narrated a ridiculous incident in his life.
Yet neither Nyanchwani nor Aliet rule over Nairobi’s booming masculinity consultancy scene where one can find controversial figures such as former radio host Andrew Kibe among more moderate voices such as Pastor Simon Mbevi who counsels men and couples or Onyango Otieno who openly talks about his experience as a male rape victim and advises men to allow themselves to be vulnerable. The most famous personality, however, is Amerix, a medical doctor from western Kenya who gives advice to Kenyan men on Twitter and through other social media channels. Although Aliet, Nyanchwani—the former writer of The Retrosexual column in The Nairobian that is now written by Brian Guserwa—and Amerix align with the global red pill movement, part of a global backlash against feminism or some of feminism’s social consequences, they do so to different degrees. While they all agree that the world has become “femicentric” and that men need to swallow the red pill to be “unplugged” from the false truths of feminism, Amerix has a more radical take on Kenya’s gender relations and not only offers answers that aim to change the totality of his adepts’ daily lives but also openly admires Paul Kagame’s autocratic style of leadership and dreams of a world where strong “Afrikan” men subdue obedient women. In his chat groups, young Kenyans are not allowed to write using “effeminate” emojis or incorrect English while dreaming about a reinstated patriarchal order and implementing Amerix’ advice by practicing semen retention to accumulate testosterone, fasting for days, lifting weights, and avoiding processed food as well as the imperial ideology spread in NGOs and churches by white men and women. Being pressured to perform economically and sexually, young men all over Nairobi beg Amerix to “continue to mislead” them by warning against get-rich-quick schemes and by ridiculing women’s expectations of large penises and pornographic sexual performances.
It would be easy to ridicule the absurdity of some of the advice given by Amerix or to call out Aliet and Nyanchwani as toxic men. Yet, over one million people are following Amerix on Twitter, and both Aliet and Nyanchwani are typical Kenyan men who, despite harbouring patriarchal inclinations, care about their children and their spouses. None of the men I met on the slopes of Mt. Kenya dreamt of enslaving women, and all agreed that a return to their fathers’ world was not desirable. However, after three years of fieldwork, I can count on the fingers of one hand those men who confided to me that they are in happy relationships or marriages. Heterosexual Kenyan men, in other words, are unhappy, and, as attested by Amerix’ fame, they are desperately looking for explanations for their experience of economic, romantic, and sexual pressure and the impasses they find themselves in financially, socially, and with regard to their relationships with women more generally. Many Kenyan men feel side-lined and, despite their willingness and attempts to provide, are unable to meet what they imagine to be—or what sometimes indeed are—the unrealistic expectations of women, which compels them to look for advice from fellow Kenyan men who seem to be the only voices resonating with the problems they face “on the ground”. Mark, an unemployed Luo migrant with a degree in physics who survived by writing essays for Chinese students with substandard English skills, responded to my question about the role of Amerix in his life with excitement:
“Amerix is talking about why shouldn’t we be us? Why do you have to be dictated by a woman? Let the woman decide whatever you have to do? Be away from friends she does not want? Do whatever she wants? You see that? So, we were like, give us this shit. […] From the first day, we were all into Amerix’ thing. […] There are some people who argue that Amerix is misleading the men, but then if you understand what Amerix is talking about, it is the real thing, the real situation on the ground.”
In such an impasse, Western journalists, social scientists, and development aid practitioners should ask themselves what social, economic, and conceptual benefits for both men and women could be generated from working with more moderate masculinity consultants such as Nyanchwani. Although they neither agree to notions of the social construction of gender nor share beliefs in the necessity to dismantle all patriarchal gender roles, they have access to the minds and hearts of Kenyan men such as Wellington, Mark, or Samuel. While I disagree with the red pill movement’s evolutionary naturalization of gender roles and its simplistic use of biological assumptions—such as female hypergamy—to explain human social relations and strongly believe that a more political-economic approach would allow men and women to attack some of the common enemies that deprive them of economic development, I also think that honest debates that include the voices of various masculinity consultants could open a conceptual space beyond, on the one hand, the capitalistic and colonial notion of the male breadwinner and provider that necessarily produces pressured men who desperately want but cannot provide for their loved ones due to the structural conditions of Kenya’s capitalistic economy, and, on the other hand, the largely still unacceptable notions of men as vulnerable and dependent that only resonate with a few middle-class Kenyans. Such progressive, open-minded, and creative debates might help to repair what appears to be a social constellation characterized by mutual misunderstanding and heightened mistrust between men and women.
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Mario Schmidt is currently a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He is the co-editor of the blog series ‘Pressure in the City’ and currently finalizing a book manuscript entitled ‘Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi. Under Pressure in an African Capital’.
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Chief Nyamweya and Anne Connelly’s graphic novel and motion comic imagines an alternative African future using storytelling and blockchain technology.
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Last month, Freehand Studios, an African digital arts and social impact studio based in Nairobi, released a graphic novel and motion comic whose story aims to inspire young Africans to imagine and build an alternative African future using blockchain technology.
Set in a fictitious African republic, TRUST tells the story of Moraa, a young female activist who, together with a group of techies called the Sankofa Collective, use the power of blockchain technology to stand up to Max—a land-grabbing oligarch whose greed threatens their communal land, their culture and the entire pastoral community.
Outside of the crypto bubble, most people—even the smartest and most sophisticated—don’t understand what blockchain and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are, or what their utility is in everyday life.
By writing the graphic novel, co-authors Chief Nyamweya and Anne Connelly have used the power of storytelling to focus more on the utility of the technology and less on the intricacies of how it works, while creatively exploring the themes of corruption, cultural and ecological preservation, historical injustices, communal trust, and land ownership.
In the novel, Moraa, the story’s protagonist, is an activist who has never heard of technologies such as DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organisations), Bitcoin and blockchain. However, when she meets Akinyi and the Sankofa Collective, she is taught about these technologies and how they work using relatable analogies. Later on in the story, we learn why they built the Wahenga DAO and why they were fundraising using bitcoins.
Three years ago, If you had walked up to a random stranger on the streets of Nairobi, Lagos or Johannesburg, woman or man, young or old, and asked them if they knew what crypto or blockchain technologies are, let alone if they had ever used them, you would most likely have been met with blank stares.
That has since changed.
In just three years, the continent has once again lived up to its name as a leader in technology adoption.
Out of a population of 53.7 million Kenyans, 4.25 million individuals possess digital currencies, the highest adoption rate in Africa according to a United Nations research report.
Nigeria has the world’s highest share of active crypto traders, a report published this year by global research firm Morning Consult found. With more than 50 per cent of monthly active adult crypto traders, Nigeria topped the list of countries with the highest share of adults that trade crypto once a month.
In just three years, the continent has once again lived up to its name as a leader in technology adoption.
Despite the directive of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) banning crypto transactions in 2021 and the subsequent fining of three banks for allegedly facilitating cryptocurrency transactions the same year, Nigerians went on to trade at least N77.75bn ($185m) worth of Bitcoin in the first three months of the year. About 33.4 million Nigerians still trade or own crypto assets.
In 2021, Nigeria was reported by Google trends as the country with the highest number of bitcoin searches globally, revealing the widespread adoption of cryptocurrency in the country.
Four million South Africans own cryptocurrencies according to Finder’s Cryptocurrency Adoption Index which ranked the country 18th out of 26 countries for crypto adoption.
Despite a widespread ban on cryptocurrency in some countries and tough regulations in others, crypto, which has so far been one of blockchain’s biggest use cases, keeps growing.
But more needs to happen.
Blockchain has a storytelling problem.
Emily Parker, the co-founder of Longhash, presented an essay on the Unchained Podcast titled Blockchain Tech’s Storytelling Problem and How to Solve it. In the episode, she explains,
“I have had countless versions of this same interaction. Step outside of the crypto bubble and say the word ‘blockchain’, and you will often hear smart and sophisticated people say things like, “I tried to understand it . . . but then I gave up.” This mental block, so to speak, has real implications for an industry whose success largely depends on network effects and public participation.”
This is a larger industry problem that continues to plague one of the most complex mass market technologies in history. As Parker further notes, the lack of a clear storyline may not have mattered during the 2017 crypto boom. However, a lot has changed since then and for a technology whose growth and future are dependent on having as many people as possible use it, it’s doing a poor job at onboarding or even creating goodwill among the public.
Some of these problems are legitimately hard to solve. But at the same time, the cryptocurrency industry is not helping itself. Instead of trying to communicate a larger vision, many are consumed by petty infighting about which tokens are best, Parker notes.
Most people globally do not know and cannot explain what blockchain is and it’s not their fault. In offering some solutions on how the blockchain industry can remedy these seemingly insurmountable challenges Parker notes,
“Some of the most important work may lie with entrepreneurs and developers. For blockchain technology to truly touch ground, it needs to be applied to products that people actually use. If a start-up can’t concisely describe its product and the problem that it is attempting to solve, then does the world really need that product?”
Her solution lies at the very heart of why Nyamweya and Connelly wrote the TRUST graphic novel.
The blockchain industry continues to be white and male-dominated. This is a problem that could threaten the technology’s global adoption. It is a status quo that enthusiasts such as Connelly who have seen the industry grow since its inception are hell-bent on challenging.
Connelly, who teaches Blockchain for Social Impact at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, first suggested the idea of writing a graphic novel to Nyamweya when the two met at Singularity University.
Nyamweya — a Kenyan writer and illustrator best known for his masterfully ink-illustrated graphic novels that address history, science and most recently, the future of education — did not understand what blockchain was before meeting Connelly. However, it did not take him long to appreciate its potential and what this power, placed in the hands of young Africans, could help them do in building their future.
Most people globally do not know and cannot explain what blockchain is and it’s not their fault.
“Young Africans are hungry for a vision of an African future rooted in trust, sustainability and freedom from unaccountable state power. It is the desire to satisfy this hunger with a story of a practicable grassroots alternative that led us to create this transmedia project called ‘TRUST’. We wanted to use the power of storytelling to speak to readers and viewers about blockchain technology, inspiring them to see a decentralized future rooted in justice and ecological sustainability.” remarked Chief while speaking at the book’s launch.
Emerging three years later is a story beautifully told in black and white illustrations that are relatable to any African familiar with the frustrations of living in a capitalistic society and dealing with centralized power.
Connelly and Nyamweya’s vision for TRUST is that millions of young Africans will have access to inspiring and culturally relevant stories that allow them to reimagine their own futures. The two believe that with new technologies such as blockchain, young Africans can build that future by claiming their seat at the table.
Africa’s literary greats come together at a festival that refocuses African writing to rememory, memorialisation and remembering histories, and curating futures.
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The just ended Macondo festival that took place in Nairobi between the 30th of September and the 2nd of October provided a rare insight into the lives and loves of some of Africa’s leading authors today—from Lusophone, Anglophone and Francophone Africa. The festival was organised by the Macondo Book Society which is led by journalist Anja Bengelstorff and award-winning Kenyan author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. It attracted some of the best writers to come out of the continent in recent times. The programme was moderated by, among others, Aleya Kassam and Dr Mshai Mwangola—gurus who helped create lively conversations on a deeply profound subject. The Orature Collective’s reading of excerpts from some of the works helped give a performative grounding to the festival. Scholars and literary enthusiasts from Kenya and the region had their fill of literariness reloaded.
The theme of the festival, The Future of Memories, was in keeping with the Macondoic charm of a space of remembering and retelling. The masterpiece by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude, from where the word Macondo is borrowed, is indeed a book of remembrances and retelling of histories and discoveries. Macondo, a town established by a distraught José Arcadio Buendía, becomes the centre of a world created by a people seeking to orientate their world and visited by gypsies who recreate the memories and remembrances. The opening line of the novel sets the tone: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” There is memory, remembrance, history, violence, family and magic all rolled up in this one line. And thus was Macondo. This article will dedicate itself to retelling the remembered things I heard with my ears and felt with my heart.
Asked why the characters in his works are distraught, Angolan writer of renown José E. Agualusa said, “Luanda is full of angry and toxic people.” About reading he said, “When you read a book, you can become another person and this getting otherness is what keeps you alive. “Asked why he writes at all, he replied: “I write to discover things, I write to know how it ends . . . It is a miracle happening before you . . . and it is ok whether people like it or not . . .” Asked why he wrote such stark criticism of the government he replied, “They don’t read books. They don’t care. So, writers can say what they want.” Is it still true that if you want to hide something you put it in a book? Anyway, asked what he thinks of himself as a writer, he posited, “A writer becomes the other, has multiple personalities; a writer must be a man, a woman, a child or even a gecko at the same time.”
When he was asked about the process of writing, Abdulrazak Gurnah gave a cryptic answer: “The best page you write you don’t know what you wrote . . . how you wrote . . . you just wrote.” This was strange coming from the Nobel Prize winner. It kind of pointed to the inspirational Muse that writers have always attributed their writing to: words and scenarios that force the hand of the writer, forging words and meaning as the pen sheds ink onto paper. His writings are preoccupied with the narratives of removal, uprooting and disinheritance of the African peoples from their culture to the alienating capitals of the West. He thinks that writing in Africa is yet to uncover much: “There is so much room for writers who take writing seriously, who do research, who take the story—the plot—as a beginning and spend time creating the world that carries it.” Soft spoken and deeply reflective, he took issue with being called “Abdul” by one of the audience.
Nadifa Mohamed thought the festival mirrored her own writing, which she sees as “meeting people between history and creativity”. On criticisms of her identity—British, or Somali nationalist—she has a scathing rejoinder: “In the time of nationalisms and bigotries the question of identities is irrelevant because what matters is being human; at worst writers have multiple identities.” She argues that African writing “must reflect Africans in the complexity of who we are. As intelligent beings, who think in complex terms regardless of who they are and where they are and when this story is set. Africans did not become complex in the present era. Our education is not predisposed to the future.” She does not entertain the definitions attributed to her by critics; she says: “I am proud of the books today I’m writing which reflect who I am now, the maturity of that. Just as am proud of my earlier books which reflect who I was then. Writing should be necessarily about self-love, whether communal or individual. Writing is a battlefield. The role of the committed writer is to fearlessly name the evil and the one who commits it.”
For Patrice Nganang writing is like working through the difficult issues we experience—tribalism etc.—and “how that carries pain even as you write it and live it. It’s painful to carry that, work through that.” Talking to Mshai Mwangola about his book, When the Plums are Ripe, he argued that the setting of a story is important, as it captures the context (the history, the sound, the taste, smell, etc.) and this carries the essence of the story. Nganang is keen on decolonising the narratives of subjugation and dismembering of Africa. He argues, for instance, that there was a system of writing in Africa, a system of encoding, a writing system that was banned by the colonial anarchists, and with that they erased our memories and histories. Nganang argues for the restoration of that system, complete with the languages of our people. He sees the revisiting of this system as being easy now with the pervasiveness of technology: “Writing is not only using technology to write; it is also about inventing the technology to write. . . coding should be taken seriously because it is the future of writing.”
He is most aggrieved by the French-led atrocities in his country where the English-speaking people of north-west Cameroon are daily facing carnage by the government: “I am Bameke. We are a people who’ve experienced genocide because of who we are. Cameroon is a landscape of murder.” Because of his opposition to the government, he had to launch his trilogy of novels (A Trail of Crab Tracks, When the Plums are Ripe and Mount Pleasant) during the festival, his preferred launch venue, Yaoundé, being off limits. He is in the process of dropping the name Patrice and forgetting French.
Memory, remembering and retelling of histories must have a long hand. Yvonne Owuor, who in the seminal remembering book The Dragonfly Sea recreates the remembered story of the Swahili Seas and the Chinese connection, said that “It is not that I have a revolutionary fervour, I am obsessed by histories and possible futures of this continent: if I don’t do this, I think I will go mad or something . . . Sometimes I think of my work as exorcisms, and exorcisms are messy, ritualistic opening of life’s doors so that light can come in again.”
For Roberta D’Alva, remembering is curated through art. For her, it is “cutting pieces of memory and putting them together to create a new memory”. This is her way of remembering without the archaism of the anthropological. Coming from Brazil, a country where people are violated by their government for seeking freedom, she is a believer in the self-redemption of the people and the collapsing of the dead narratives of redemptive leadership. She finds political activists who come with the messianic predisposition appalling: “It is not a matter of giving voice to people, to communities, no. Everyone has voice. What people need is ears . . . people need to be heard. So, [leaders] shut up and listen!”
Angolan/Portuguese poet Yara Monteiro emphasized the power of song and rhythm in bringing out meaning and memory: “A child may not know how to speak but definitely knows how to shake to the rhythm of poetry/music.” Sylvie Kandé shared the poetic complexity of hybridity based on her retelling of the exploits of 14th Century Mali Emperor Abubakar in The Never-ending Quest for the Other Shore. Guinea Bissau’s Abdulai Silá shared about the visions of freedom in his The Ultimate Tragedy. Mia Couto joined virtually to talk about his writing. His adoption of magical realism in writing is informed by the “migrating notions of peace and freedom” in Mozambique. Naivoharisoa Patrick Ramamonjisoa, popularly known as Naivo, a Malagasy novelist-historian also graced the festival. His works, particularly his novel Beyond the Rice Fields, is a “past-present-future” recreation of Malagasy societies. Hafsa Zayyan was perhaps the most intriguing writer present. A personification of remembered pasts, her work We are all Birds of Uganda reads like a call to re-identity, re-acceptance and re-generation. Film makers Wanuri Kahiu and writers Gloria Mwaniga, Khadija Bajaber and Denis Mugaa from Kenya also participated and shared in the festival.
Gurnah, Nganang, Yvonne and Sila… all the greats together. Photo. Wambua Kawive
The rich festival was a refocusing of African writing to rememory, memorialisation and remembering histories and curating futures—asking and answering the question other earlier African greats asked in the 1960s “Conference of African Writers of English Expression” as the Makerere meeting was called: “What is African literature?”
In the third and final part of a review of Lawino’s People: The Acholi of Uganda by Okot p’Bitek and Frank Knowles Girling, A.K. Kaiza concludes that it is Okot’s writing on the religion of his Central Luo that may have rubbed tender egos the wrong way, and the reason why he was failed by Oxford University.
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“I think Okot p’Bitek stopped giving thought to Oxford. He understood the colonial venture quite clearly and he believed that we Africans needed to sort ourselves out. In any case, by the time they asked him to revise the thesis (after which they would fail it again) he had already been a successful poet and cultural icon in his own right — setting up arts festivals in Kisumu and Gulu as well as being the first African director of the National Theatre in Kampala.” Juliane Okot Bitek
“Woko, Wi-lobo and Ru-piny were not deities, not spirits or powers. They were not worshiped, no sacrifices were offered to them. And when a man cried ‘Wi-lobo,’ he was not calling on anybody or anything. They were not a prayer or supplication. They were descriptive of the sad predicament of human existence.”
These words, lying deep in the book, after so much has been said and said so passionately, are not the most dramatic in a 625 page-strong tome. But if you were to choose which ones best capture the spirit of this publication, they would not be a bad place to start.
They sound a fairly representative note of the intellectual locus of the man who wrote them. A world view you likely first encountered in Song of Lawino, that gently insistent, powerfully cultured note has since become so much a part of the literary furniture of postcolonial Africa that attributing them to Okot is no longer necessary.
The phrase “sad predicament of human existence”, may sound like any pithy observation that makes instant sense, but after 511 pages, at which point they appear, you as an African reader are desperate for the insight this brings.
The sidelining of the academic and scholarly works of Frank Girling and Okot p’Bitek by Oxford University under the supervision of Prof Evans-Pritchard remains a scandalous event, at least to those of us who expected better from British higher learning. In his introduction to the double publication, Tim Allen, Professor and director of the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa at the LSE, writes that “In the case of Frank Girling, it is obvious why his work is neglected. Although he managed to secure his D. Phil in 1952, he had fallen foul of the Protectorate authorities in Uganda . . . in contrast, the overlooking of Okot p’Bitek’s anthropological contributions is harder to understand.”
Prof. Tim Allen explains that another Evans-Pritchard student and Oxford alumni, Talal Asad, published a collection by well-known anthropologists expounding the very views Okot had postulated. This was the view that British anthropology had played handmaiden to colonial injustice, providing the justificatory, academised loot that made the whip and chain wielders feel less guilty. Allen goes on to say that by the late 1960s, Okot was angry (as a black man, being called “angry” is not flattering), and defiant.
He explains that the offending thesis itself is moderate in tone. So, Okot could not be accused of going rogue activist in the haloed temple of academia.
“It was even more of a casualty of British anthropology’s colonial encounter,” he writes, addressing and at the same time, not addressing, the intrigue.
It has been five decades since the event and we still don’t know why. But after 625 pages, does resolution come?
As far as the Okot part of the publication is concerned, there is nothing really new in the way Girling’s bit is. The central attraction in the Okot section, The Religion of the Central Luo, was published in 1971 by The East African Literature Bureau and went on to have its stellar moment in thinking on African societies.
This resurrection renews the work, and Allen’s introduction along with the shattering clarity of Girling’s materialist approach to anthropology, opens the secret socio-political chambers hidden in the rites and rituals Okot describes here.
The two transform Okot’s text into a crime scene. We approach it, sleuthing tools in hand, ferreting in the undergrowth of scholarly nuance for that stray error that exclaims, aha! Got you!
It is so very much like Okot to come back from the grave to give us once again that frisson of novelty and courage.
But the stigmata is visible. There is an odd, incompleteness in it. We already encountered this oddity in Girling’s part of the book. The explanation for that, we were told, is that the colonial authorities and their academic mentors in Oxford cut Girling’s work with one year left in it so any publishing can only stitch mismatching body parts on.
This affects Okot’s work at a structural level. He describes well the history and politics of Jo Paluo and Alur in the opening chapters. He is starting to establish a historical particularity for his subject. He is also challenging the idea of tribes by showing the cultural-political continuum across colonially tribalised communities.
In Chapter 2, he glancingly connects these to Bunyoro, but we assume that was outside his scope, or he did not have the time to delve much into that, although we can infer from the long line of queen mothers of Bunyoro-Kitara rulers (Abakama) taken from the Luo-speakers, and the tracing of its lineage to Labongo, that this is the case. In any case, the politics of Bunyoro and that of the Central Luo, particularly the Payira Clan, who are also Babiito, like the rulers of Bunyoro-Kitara, which filial connections cover the other kingdoms in the country, were so interwoven that calling them allies would be an under-description.
Okot ropes the Lango into this Central Luo grouping whilst acknowledging the difficulty of saying so with certainty. The Lango too had their tight military alliances with Bunyoro-Kitara.
But we note a glaring omission. Okot talks at length about Acoli religion and religious practice when the section arrives. He does not do so with that of the Jo Palwo, Alur or Lango. Could the frustrations he met at Oxford have prevented further work? What emerges sounds more like the religion of the Acholi than of the Central Luo. Is it even remotely possible that Okot did not see such a thing, so that his failure to recognise the obvious failed his D.Phil?
One of the most important contributions Okot makes to African studies is on ethnicity. Where his errant antecedents Driberg, Crazzolara and Roscoe wrote of “tribe” in such a way that Africa is transformed into an archipelago of hostile communities, Okot raises out of the colonial abyss the many connecting cultural bridges, so that the familiar fact which prompts Africans when they meet fellow Africans to declare “we really are one people,” emerges. Had Oxford given its imprimatur to such a view, might the likes of Kwame Appiah have written a less discreditable book than In My Father’s House, a book with an annoying colonial view that Africans are disparate tribes?
Okot lends powerful evidence to the position of many black scholars who insist that African societies are language, rather than tribal groups. But it is in Okot on the religion of his Central Luo that one instinctively feels that his work may have rubbed tender egos the wrong way.
It is a lively, closely observed section running to six chapters. He opens by examining theories of Jok, then the variations on the idea, and expanding on the African pantheistic concept of deism. He next turns attention to worship places, the Abila, or Kac, the family shrines. He looks at spirit-possession, witchcraft and sorcery, then that social institution of lam, kir and kwong which he calls curses but can also be expansively seen as invocations, and which we need to hear more of for it is a literary genre of African societies which in our time has been brought dramatically to life by Stella Nyanzi. But that is another topic altogether. As these topics follow one after the other, a pattern starts to emerge. He tackles first the idea of God (Jok), and gradually works down to practices that have a filigree of the religious but are otherwise quasi-spiritual and mostly having nothing to do with worship but have been erroneously attributed so.
Take Chapter 9 on Woko, Wi-Lobo and Ru-Piny. As he explains them, these concepts are philosophical, prepositional; Wi-lobo as boundarisation of existence, “Wi, on top of, above, and the common noun lobo, earth. Literally it meant on the land above the soil or earth. But in the context in which we are discussing it, Wi-lobo meant the state of being alive on the earth, being in this world.”
Wi-lobo approximates to what other philosophical traditions refer to as Being. Woko, literally translating as outside, is synonymous with Wi-lobo but as Okot explains it, the idea is something like becoming, a state of transience from, into and beyond. There is much ambiguity about Ru-Piny. It means dawn, dawning, which on the face of it is the passage from darkness to light, the burnishing of the night. And yet, it is also about the exchange of the woes of darkness with those of the light, the double-facedness of existence — an existentialist notion.
Okot puts it better in his inimitable way: “Against Wi-lobo and Ru-Piny, man was impotent. They knelt on their victims and crushed them. There was nothing you could do to prevent them from carrying out their cruel schemes . . . because Wi-lobo, Woko and Ru-Piny were also deaf, blind and senseless.”
These concepts are far-reaching and are to be found as the framing concepts of Luo arts and music, the protagonists of much music and theatre flung into the face of inscrutable fate. Mr Crazzolara, and you benighted Boccassino, this is about art and philosophy, not religion!
Okot’s focus on this triad is, in my opinion, the key that provides entrance into what the religious belief of the people was and what it was not; it is also the key that frees African theology from the demonic incarceration imposed on it by imperial Christianity and anthropology. But before we have arrived at this point (chapter 9) we have been through six prior chapters during which Okot took on the establishment of western scholarship on African religion.
In few places has the black man been more traduced than in his relationship with God. In sexuality, industry, politics, science, commerce, marriage and health, the entire heritage of the black man came under attack by the amassed battalions of enslavers, colonisers and free traders. These attacks follow a template, which is that what is African is dirty, at a primitive stage, without order and purpose.
The other name they used for black people, besides savages, is heathens, kafir, as though our souls (when allowed that we had any) were properties of the devil already.
Okot’s thesis here charges explorers, imperial agents, scholars and missionaries for not only refusing to understand African religions, but for calling whatever they saw happening as so much animist garbage. Africans were accused of worshiping forests, rocks, streams and lakes; we had no idea of a supreme being, no idea of an afterlife.
Okot calls up one at a time, the big names that misled the world about African spirituality:
Sir Samuel Baker, John Roscoe, Joseph Pasquale Crazzolara, Charles Gabriel Seligman, Renato Boccassino, Godfrey Lienhardt, Jack Herbert Driberg, Captain Ernest Grove, John Beattie, Bere, Hayley, Kitching, Tarantino, Taylor Tempels, Middleton, Menzies, Southall, Gray, and many more quoted here, had the same approach — the Africans did not know what they were saying; pay no attention no matter how intelligent they appear to be; study his ways and draw conclusions from that.
Anthropology, in a way, is the fine art of not listening.
Crazzolara best captures this attitude when he writes of what went on in the conversion enterprise: “Natives were urged with tiresome questions to make a choice as to which of the Jok among the many had created them. Such questions implied suppositions which probably never occurred to their simple minds . . . they answered that they did not know, which was more near the truth.”
On the back of a single observation in Equatorial Province, Baker, the pugnacious explorer-colonial agent, concluded that Africans had no religion nor conception of a deity. Baker had a theological debate with a man he names as “Commoro”, in Lotuko, over the existence of a being superior to mankind. This debate, done via a Lotuko translator who understood Bari, to a Bari translator who understood Arabic henceforth to Baker, is recorded by Baker whom we can only take at his word. It is comical. After intense, very patronising exchanges, the man Commoro replies to Baker (of good and bad people): “If they are strong they take from the weak. The good people are all weak; they are good because they are not strong enough to be bad.”
The statement is startling with its raw, irreproachable realism. But Baker, Okot charges, was only interested in affirming his own beliefs and not learning that of Commoro.
The approach they took was to strip-search Africans for spiritual beliefs and feed what they found into a bonfire of racism, an act of culturecide. But there was a challenge to overcome. People don’t let go of their beliefs like that. To make it stick, the Christian god they carried with them (in much the same way African rulers carried Jok from one place to another) had to be disguised as an African deity — a bizarre minstrel act in which Jahweh wore blackface — and faked an African accent. This necessitated taking an existing African deity, emptying it of content and replacing it with Roman-Christian theology. This gave conversion the feel of a smooth segue, with converts often not feeling the jab.
And this is the violence Okot rails against. Through this mendacity, African pantheism was replaced by a monotheistic ethos. The senatorial Republic of gods was superseded by a tyrannical, fili-deist, Augustan imperialism, a one family-rule religion. Rubanga was bleached white, right here in the tropics. The function of African gods disappeared under the harsh colonial regime. Black gods like Mungu, Nyasae, Katonda, Ruhanga, Ngai, Nzambe and Rubanga, worshiped long before the White Fathers and Church Missionary Society arrived, became colonially reconstructed évolués, front-company enterprises; like Liberian flags of convenience, they concealed the real, tax-dodging paymaster in the background. They had become spiritually possessed by an invasive spiritual species.
Among his Central Luo, the missionaries settled on an import from Bunyoro-Kitara, the Luo-ised “Rubanga” (also Lubanga/Obanga) from “Ruhanga”. This was one god among many, picked out because one missionary caught a whiff of the word “mold”, synonymous with create. In similar vein, in Buganda, the missionaries alighted on the Kiganda god of fabricants, Katonda, a lesser deity compared to Lubaale, also from the root verb okutonda (to fashion) as Jahweh’s tropicalised incarnation there. In the case of the Luo, the missionaries did not listen long enough to know that they saw Rubanga as an unpleasant god that afflicted man with tuberculosis of the spine. The name stuck, much to the amusement of South Sudanese writer, Taban lo Liyong, who has had much to say about it.
These scholars did not listen to what the Africans were saying about their beliefs. They chose to infer instead and came up with such ideas as “supreme being”, “life force”; their African sources said they had nothing of the sort. They next looked to the places where worship took place, in “forests”, rocks, along rivers and lakes and said Africans worshiped these; the Africans said this was not true. The Africans, they decided, were too daft to know their own minds.
What kind of defence can one start to mount? Okot presents the many ways in which African religious practice was misrepresented. The central pattern in all these is that the interlocutors had come to impose their beliefs and truth is always an inconvenience to imperial enterprise.
Outside of the monotheistic framework, getting a handle on gods gets complex. But Okot is also entering very dangerous territory. Any African knows just how dangerous it is to even express knowledge of pre-colonial gods; even if you know, you must pretend ignorance. Even the most highly educated feels the pressure to pay lip service to the Christian god. At Makerere, Okot would have walked past the Main Hall flanked by two Christian churches, his own faculty under the shadow of the Protestant St. Francis Church. It need not be said that academia, as the British brought it to Uganda, must first acknowledge the primacy of the Christian doctrine. Throw away the cloak of academia from colonial anthropology and you can clearly see the medievalism in the saga. Growing up in Lango, I was aware that the word Jok was associated with the unsayable, not exactly the devil himself, but the dark and the demonic. And yet next door to the Luo speakers, among the Ateker, the very word itself denotes goodness and sanctity: in Teso we used to sing “Ejok na Edeke” – God is good. In Lango itself, a song sang to children wishing them a prosperous future mentioned Jok, “Jo’jok amalo do/Atini dong roman do,” as a line went, so it was also a word associated with the good among the Luo, for who wishes demons upon her baby?
It was in later years that I came to understand that the fear of jok was itself the shame we had in our own material past, which shame the priests reminded you of each Sunday morning, and via a catechism you learnt by rote. Those of us who dodged catechism classes for confirmation were forbidden from the Eucharist, and can never marry under the Christian banner. These catechism classes are the forges in which black people are still daily taught to be ashamed of their blackness. It will never end, for the forced conversion accuses us of a sin we can’t help but commit; it accuses us of being black.
Okot starts his dissection of Jok by going into the myths of their genesis. The Jok came in various ways. But one interesting one is that it was the founding leaders of the various Acholi states (chiefdom is a reductive colonial term) that also brought the Jok, as indeed Constantine imposed Christianity on Rome. The founder of Patiko, Atiko himself (we learn from Okot that the many Acholi states starting with “Pa” follow after their founder. Hence, Atiko founder of Patiko, Aweli founder of Pawel, etc.); so that this Jok becomes thought of as the god of Atiko, as others can speak of the god of Abraham.
The Jok of Patiko were Baka and Alela. The complexity here is that Baka and Alela then gave names to hills, so that when he came to Patiko, John Beattie concluded that these hills were considered the father and the mother of the people. Okot sought out a priest of Baka who he said laughed at the idea and said Jok Baka and Alela merely resided in caves in the hills.
He examines the Jok of Koc, called Jok Lokka. It is recognisable in many religious founding myths when the Acholi of Koc, after they fled hunger and crossed the Nile (not the first people in religious mythology to cross the Nile in search of bounty) to Bunyoro, say that one Ojwiya disappeared into the wilderness and returned transformed and started performing miracles, including for instance, multiplying the number of chicks. They called the Jok of Ojwiya Jok Lokka because he came from across the Nile. A people with a religious myth like this can only be converted for political, not religious, reasons. In truth there was little daylight between the religion of it in these parts and the biblical accounts.
As Okot writes, he refamiliarises to you the African reader, what colonial ethnographers had alienated. But he also puts these religious beliefs squarely within the locus of what all religions appear to have — founding myths, miraculous births, disappearances into the wilderness. But religion is politics, and imperialism commanded that savages cannot have a past similar to that of the conqueror.
These anthropologists never imagined that black people would ever read what they wrote. Open any anthropology text and the statement is always there. This may have emboldened them to print any balderdash they cooked up. But could these scholars also not have considered that people were forbidden to discuss their religion with strangers and that the answers they received were wilfully diversionary? Was Okot told the truth because he was himself a local?
Okot also discusses totems and food prohibitions. Although these are closely held, they are not gods, Okot insists, for these totems were so interpreted by colonial scholars who henceforth said that because say an elephant or leopard totem was given near-human potency, it indicated worship. They ought to have followed the matter to discover that those of the elephant clan considered it one of them but not above them.
Okot also states that keeping an ancestral shrine (Abila), and making sacrifices to ancestors did not indicate ancestor worship.
It gets more intricate, and as the unfurling of Jok continues, it begins to appear that the term was indeed very widely conceived. It seems to go beyond the idea of a deity. Take the so-called “cults” of Ala, Omarari and Abiba. Omarari is said to have appeared at the end of the First World War. Ala came earlier, Abiba around the Second World War.
It is on the question of “cults” that it starts to become hard to call colonial anthropology an academic discipline. Even Okot’s own reaction is problematic. Could they and he not see what was right there in their face?
The “cults”, said to have “followers” and that feel different to the earlier “jok”, are Ala, Omarari, Abiba and others but I will concentrate on these three.
Take Ala. The “cult” performance of Ala consisted of wearing long white robes and turban and pronouncing Arabic words. We already start to see where this is heading. The “followers” of Abiba are said to have believed that a “witch” sent kites into the sky which had fire in their anuses. There is less description of Omarari except to say it followed an epidemic.
Each of these “cults” follow major events and intrusions into these societies. And then they disappear as quickly. What they appear to be are memorialization and communication, performance arts that mark their epoch.
Were these gods, cults or simply pieces of theatre and performing arts, in the manner of masquerade ceremonies? Do plays and films that gain cult status signal worship? Does Elvis Presley following, sightings, costuming, festivals or re-enactments of the American Civil War signal religion? Is the one a god and Gettysburg worshiped? Are the ritualized practices of psychotherapy to heal soldiers returning from war witchcraft? The so-called Abiba cult, a presentation of bombers in mythologised form, was precisely that, albeit by African experts to heal black soldiers returning from Burma (the painting, Guernica, had its own way of portraying this terrifying new power).
There is reason to believe that the “cult” of Ala was a way of dealing with the trauma of Arab slavers from Sudan, for they invoked “Allah” when they attacked Africans.
As with Woko, Wi-lobo, Ru-piny, and Bala and Alela rocks, the notion of the cult reveals the pugnacious impatience imperial scholars had towards the ways of the people they had come to occupy. Those who waited a minute to really try and understand Africa, like Girling, were accused of going native. White people who disagreed with imperialism were severely ostracized. Nuances that would have separated philosophy, legalities (we have not even talked about the manner in which African laws were reduced to taboos), performance arts from religion were cruelly traduced.
To worsen it, The Witchcraft Act was passed which broadly illegalised the people’s beliefs, arts, philosophies and psychotherapy practices. Missionaries established missionary villages at which children were held captive and punished if found to have learnt their culture.
The amassed ranks of colonial scholars are today a disgraced lot. Few if any in Africa take them seriously. Colonialism and its colour bars had artificially kept their magic alive. Decolonisation meant western universities had to tread carefully and, in an interesting twist, many Western scholars are today at the forefront of the defence of African history, as witness the publication of this book. But the hegemony persists, for rather than colour bars, new barriers like travel restrictions mean that western research maintains its extractive practice. The kind of access western scholars have to Africa, African scholars cannot have in their countries. In this industry, we remain native informers. The prosthetics of censorship such as Okot suffered may have kept their respectability for only so long, but the damage they and universities like Oxford did to people of colour will endure for a very long time.
By now, we are wondering where Lawino and her song comes in. Very closely indeed. It appears to have its roots in the worship and prayer ceremonies to jok, which is fitting, for arts everywhere are largely secularised religious rites. Okot being Okot, we expect him to move beyond the turf war with European scholars and celebrate the social and religious side of his Central Luo. He does so with aplomb. His thesis settles frequently into enjoying the beauty of Acholi culture. The most humorous part for me is the quotation of the prayer offered by the people of Palaro to their Jok, Lapul. It bears quoting at length for there is the suggestion that this is the prototype for the Lawino-Okot joust:
Pule ye
Pule oh (Pule is pet name of Lapul)
Pule pa Lacic
Pule (daughter) of Lacic
Anyaka mutero coo i rok
The girl who marries a man outside the chiefdom
Mor wange woko
Explode her eyeballs
Anyaka ma deg awone Palaro
The girl who rejects men of Palaro
Anyaka me mito lu-rok
The girl who loves foreigners
Nek Wang cware woko
Kill her husband’s eyes
Nek cware woko
Kill her husband
The men had had their say before God. Now the women stepped forth:
Pule ye
Pule oh
Pule pa Lacic
Pule (daughter) of Lacic
Anyira wai bene litinni
The girls are also your children
Wegi bolli no
Your children with the spears (penis)
Bene gukelo anyira rok
Have also brought foreign girls
Ci pe ineko wanggi
But you have not killed their eyes
Wan bene gin ma neko wang wa peke
We too nothing will kill our eyes
Okwong ki la-lam
Let it (misfortune) begin with the ill-wisher
Pule pa Lacic
Pule (daughter) of Lacic
Wek okwong ki-lam
Let it begin with the ill-wisher
Mukelo anyira rok
Whoever brings a foreign girl
Nek wange woko
Kill his eyes
Nek dako-ne woko
Kill his wife
Okwong ki-lam
Let it begin with the ill-wisher
Pule pa Lacic, konywa
Pule (daughter) of Lacic, help us
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