Nairobi Diaries 8: the Glocal Maasai Market

 Ooooh, so many pretty colors!!! 

I gotta admit, I’m a bit proud of this photograph I took of the Maasai Market in downtown Nairobi. Isn’t it pretty? We went there one morning after visiting the National Museum and the memorial to the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassay, which is also downtown not far from the market. It was a rare moment of classic tourism for our trip, and a couple members of our group were very excited about spending all their money on statuettes, jewelry, and decorated cloth. The Maasai Market’s very reason-for-being is to satisfy the desire of tourists — desire for what, I’m not really sure. For mementos of their time in Kenya? To own some objects with the aura of authenticity? Hmmm… I must admit, this kind of shopping has never been my cup of tea, and quite probably “I just don’t get it”…. Take me to a bookstore or a swank restaurant — now those are things I can get into… and so I spent most of my time in the market taking photos of my colleagues as they tried their best to bargain. I had quite a lot of fun in my own way.

And here are the two things I noticed as I walked from stall after stall after stall of trinkets — (1) the repetition and (2) the insistant claim about every object’s authenticity. I think I saw exactly the same print or statuette about thirty different times in ten different locations, and each time the salesman tried to convince me that this was handmade by a member of his family. Maybe they were, but my intuition told me that in some cases there was probably more than just a little mass-production going on. I’d be interested in an economic and/or cultural study of this market, and it appears that someone else is interested too since a quick google search got me this syllabus here and this scholarly article here. My favorite “authentic” Maasai wrap (or shuka), was the one with Barack Obama’s face on it.  A couple days earlier, at a supermarket, I saw a Maasai woman wearing such an Obama-adorned shuka, so I guess they actually are authentic and not just for tourists.

The Maasai are only 2% of the population of Kenya (in comparison to the Kikuyu who are 22%, the Luhya 14%, the Luo 13%, the Kalenjin 12%, etc.), but they are the Kenyan ethnic group most famous to the outside world, perhaps because of their unusual ear piercings, their fame as warriors, and — as a nomadic culture — their refusal to integrate into the modern world. As professor Leslie Rabine has noted [here] in her book The Global Circulation of African Fashion, what the Maasai are most famous for is simply for having “kept their culture.”  

Except maybe they have integrated into the modern world after all — into what economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein calls the “modern capitalist world system” — by adapting their culture to the rapidly changing Kenyan economy, population growth, and land scarcity. Just as Saudi Arabia’s economy is based on oil, so too the Maasai contribute to the Kenyan GDP by selling their own authenticity, exoticism, and rebel spirit to the world. In other words, paradoxically, they have adapted to the global marketplace by refusing to adapt.

As I have discussed in a previous blog post about Oromo hip hop (as well as in my forthcoming article on globalization theory in the new James Bond movie), such cultural exchange is an example of what some theorists call “glocalization” — a neologism that combines two antithetical concepts, the global and the local. The word was originally coined in the Japanese business community as dochakuka, meaning the adaptation of mass produced, global products to local environments and/or the adaptation of local products to the global market, but it has been picked up by sociologists and literary critics to conceptualize the dialectical nature of globalization. In other words, because the word neatly combines antitheses (local being the opposite of global), it seems useful for exploring the strange, contradictory, and dialectical nature of capitalism. In this case, it would seem to illustrate Fredric Jameson’s argument in this essay here that globalization does not simply intensify sameness (a.k.a. McDonaldization); it also, and at the same time, intensifies difference (i.e., the Maasai Market).

Okay, that’s nice, but so what? Well, the “so what?” is precisely the question that the concept is supposed to focus our attention on. In other words, the point is not to say hooray “glocalization” exists, woot! woot! Because concepts don’t exist. Rather, concepts focus our attention on questions about the relations among things that do exist. So, a number of research questions might follow from my conceptualization of this market experience. How do we understand a culture such as the Maasai as modern or not modern in relation to the capitalist world market? What is the causal chain that led to the Maasai developing in such a way and other ethnic groups developing in different ways? Can we say that the Maasai culture is simply authentic, indigenous, and/or pre-modern when it seems to be so powerfully affected by a postmodern European, American, and Asian consumer culture? Economically speaking, how do we assess the value of any of the objects, and psychologically speaking, why do we want them? Is the global market good for providing a means for the Maasai to survive as a culture in the McDonaldizing world, or does it trap them in a vicious cycle of undevelopment and poverty?

Nairobi Diaries 7: The Non-Place of Kibera and the Utopian Politics of Dance

Kibera: Africa's largest slum

One day we visited the Cardinal Otunga Girl’s Empowerment Center in the morning and the Christ the King parish’s library and school in the afternoon. At both places, we met monastics, social workers, teachers, and legal advocates working together to give disadvantaged children both the practical and the cultural skills for escaping poverty. The former institution is run by nuns and is located in a quiet, suburban environment, and it is something like an orphanage for teenage girls to get them off the streets. The latter is located in one of the world’s largest slums, Kibera. Kibera is somewhat unique compared to other slums because even though over a million people live there, the government (for various political reasons that I don’t understand) doesn’t officially recognize that it exists. Consequently, there is almost no official infrastructure. Electricity, running water, sanitation, schools, daycare, and even real streets strong enough to support an automobile – all these are extremely scarce, and what there is has mostly been innovated by the impoverished people who live there or by non-governmental organizations. Some of the girls at the empowerment center came from Kibera.

When you go to a place such as Kibera (and without a guide, you probably shouldn’t), you expect mile after mile of intense poverty. You expect the smell of raw sewage, and you expect to see babies playing in that raw sewage. But what I didn’t expect was middle-aged men in business suits coming home from work. What I didn’t expect to see was young adults studying quietly in a library. What I didn’t expect was a class of children carefully and joyfully choreographing a dance. And that’s what I want to talk about in this blog. On the one hand, since Kibera does not officially exist (not part of the census or the GDP) it is something of a non-place. But within that negative, hellish non-place is another more positive non-place — the utopian project of the Christ the King school and library. And connected to both the hellish and the hopeful non-places is yet another non-place in the idyllic, suburban sanctuary of the Girls Empowerment Center. And within these spaces, I saw something I want to call the ”utopian politics of dance” — and what I mean by that is the subject of this blog post.

(Excuse the long theory-laden parentheses, but for those of you reading my blog who are unfamiliar with Thomas More’s famous book or with the literary history of the concept that his book generated, I am using the word utopia as More did – as a double entendre for no-place (outopos in ancient Greek) and good place (eutopos). As an aside, I want to also mention that More’s double entendre might be a useful conceptual tool for thinking through a statement I mentioned in Nairobi Diary 5 that my colleague made — that never before had he more strongly felt the presence of God or witnessed in the labor of the social workers God’s work being done… that God was here. There is a powerful yoking together of two contradictory senses in that theological formulation just as there is in More’s play on words. Why articulate God’s goodness and sublime beauty in the context of such absolute horror, poverty, oppression, and violence? Why does one seem to both rhetorically and ontologically require the other?)

But before I go on with my philosophical exploration of spaces, I want to ask you to keep in mind the dancing not only because all of my colleagues were totally impressed by it but also because, once again, just like I did in my Nairobi Diaries 5 post, I want to put my experience in Kenya in dialogue with some stuff I have been reading recently for my more scholarly research – critiques of Paul Gilroy’s famous book of theory, The Black Atlantic. In it Gilroy makes an argument against an American version of Black Nationalism that asserts a unified, essential pre-colonial African identity and myth of origins — i.e., roots — and argues for a more transnational identity politics grounded in the movement of peoples and cultures – i.e., routes. Gilroy celebrates innovative, culturally hybrid forms of music such as reggae and hip hop as tools of cultural resistance to racism, poverty, and the exploitation of labor. In response to Gilroy, quite a number of theorists (such as Laura Chrisman, Neil Lazarus, and an entire issue in 1996 of the journal Research in African Literatures) have critiqued his distinction between the “lived crisis” of ordinary people’s experience and the “systemic crisis” emphasized by Marxist theory, black nationalism, and pan-African political strategies that all emphasize some form of broad political solidarity against the forces of ”Western” capitalism. These critics argue that Gilroy undermines the political strategies of coalition building in favor of a vague “cultural resistance” whose form is somewhat utopian. It’s hard for me to do justice to the many facets and astute sophistication of both Gilroy’s argument and the many critiques of it in something like my blog, but to relate Gilroy to Kenya’s recent crisis of ethnic violence, one can see him emphasizing the more transnational forms of cultural identity that synthesize old and new, foreign and domestic, rather than ethnic identities, Kenyan nationalism, or postcolonial critiques of global capitalism (i.e., critiques of “systemic crisis”), since all of these projects have (for very different reasons) failed. Hence, Gilroy would probably appreciate what I wrote in Nairobi Diaries 2 about Kenyan literary responses to the ethnic violence that bring together the poetics of everyday life with a utopian, transcendent spirit and wit. But against Gilroy, the professor of English Supriya Nair wonders – and I wonder right along with her — why he makes it seem like the distinction between “lived crisis” and “systemic crisis” is an either/or. Instead of focusing either on lived crisis (i.e., personal experience and local culture) or systemic crisis (i.e., international politics and global economy), why not both together?

Okay, now I want to come back to the school children dancing in Kibera, which we witnessed just one year after ethnic violence burned across the nation but was especially brutal in Kibera where people were hacked to death and even burned alive. (One of the people working in Christ the King’s school showed my colleagues and me photographs of the violence, and you can read this recent article about the effects of that violence a year later.) The young students whom we saw were not just dancing their blues away; rather they were choreographing the dances of the many different ethnic groups in Kenya. In other words, with the guidance of their teachers, these students were theorizing through dance a multicultural identity that would simultaneously affirm and transcend ethnicity. So far, so good — I am totally impressed, and I think Gilroy would be happy. But what his critics suggest that he unfortunately leaves out is a complete characterization of the actual physical space in which such culture is happening.  In my case, using his theoretical approach would lead me to ignore how the students’ dancing is guided by teachers and social workers with a very definite political strategy (not to mention the very material support of a very powerful Catholic Church) for effecting positive change. People had to build these spaces in which the kids were dancing after all. The teachers have to get paid.

So, agreeing with Supriya Nair, I think the utopian politics of these children’s dancing is quite sophisticated in how it brings together a cultural response to lived crisis and a political response to systemic crisis. Likewise, I think we can conceptually bring together the idea of a”cultural responses to lived crisis” and the idea of a “political responses to systemic crisis” in how we think about the library at the Christ the King parish – where, by the way, I noticed by glancing through the record of borrowings on the front desk that the most popular books were the practical ones about business, farming, and applied science, not the books about Catholic spirituality, literature, or politics. And I mention this fact for those who might want to donate books to the library. They need science and business books, not propaganda. But that said, the propaganda matters, too — matters in a positive way. In the stairwell of this library, somebody had painted a beautiful mural celebrating not just the neighborhood where these people live, but also suggesting the utopian promise of a way out.

Nairobi Diaries 6: “Wild” Animals and the Environment

As I mentioned in Nairobi Diary 1 — the overall itinerary — we did have some time to do a bit of that touristy safari thing and see some animals. And of course when I show people the 600-plus photographs that I took in Kenya, the ones everyone oohs and ahhhs over are the animal photos, not the people photos. (And this should come as no surprise if you’ve read Wainaina’s satire “How to write about Africa.”) I’m a contrarian by nature, so I was going to not blog about the animals just out of spite for all ya’ll who love them so. I tend to be that sarcastic friendless guy who snidely demystifies everything — especially the kind of myth of Africa one finds in Hollywood movies.

But then I looked up some fun facts and came to a different conclusion. The tourism industry based on that safari myth is 10% of Kenya’s GDP — the third largest contributor to the overall economy after agriculture and manufacturing according to its government. I imagine also that it’s one of the only things protecting the land from pollution produced by weakly regulated industrial farming. So, this is one of those instances where I should be encouarging the myth, because the myth does really good work, but as I mentioned before, my impression of Kenya’s reality is that it is very crowded with people, farms (both industrial and subsistance), and commercial cities. Just like every other country in the world, from the U.S. to Japan to Europe, the days of unowned land seemed long gone to me. Hence, government run parks there are aplenty. Ironically, after I came back to Minnesota from my trip to Africa, I saw some “wild” animals (that is to say, really wild and not in a game park — a baby deer one day, a fox the next) running around my university’s pristine campus.

city of Nairobi behind the "wild" giraffe

My group never got out to any of the big, beautiful wildlife parks that are so popular with tourists, because we had another agenda, but one afternoon we did spend a few hours driving through the Nairobi National Park, which is 117 square kilometers huge and only seven kilometers from the center of the city. As you might imagine, searching for animals was really a lot of fun, and we saw giraffes, gazelles, rhinos, ostrich, buffalo, baboons, zebras, warthogs, etc. — all that stuff that you’ve all seen in picture books, so I’m not going to spend time putting up all my pictures of the animals when you can find better ones taken by more skillful photographers on the internet.

Two things that I found interesting were (1) how close the city was, which you can see in this photo, and (2) how close the animals would get to us. In fact, they appeared to be so used to tourists driving about taking pictures, they would stand there looking at our car completely unperturbed. In the middle of the day, they were hard to spot because they were hiding from the hot sun, not from us, so keep that in mind if you go. And notably, we only saw the vegetable-eating animals, no carnivores.

They're coming straight at us... Run!

The only carnivores I saw that day were my fellow travellers, and after the park we went to the most touristy restaurant in the country — named appropriately The Carnivore, where you can eat as much meat as you want. The waiters walk around with skewers of beef, goat, chicken, ostrich, crocodile, etc., and you take your pick, and then wash it down with some of Kenya’s gorgeously refreshing Tusker beer.

The second-to-last day of our trip, when were on the western edge of Kenya, we took a boat ride in one of Lake Victoria’s large bays. We saw a hippo, and then as we got closer, that hippo became two, then three, and suddenly a whole posse of hippos were coming straight at us, so our guide started up the motor and we took off.

However, the lake was brown with polution. Our guide said that when he was a boy the lake was clear and beautiful, but alas, no more. The difficulty with the lake, I was told, is that several countries use it, and getting one country to find the will to do some environmental conservation is hard enough — but several countries collaborating during a time of ethnic violence, even harder. I am beginning to see the value of an Eco-Tourism industry, something I was skeptical of before since I once believed the government should just protect the land and the animals by effectively enforcing good environmental policy.  Maybe such a thing as tourism might help save this lake, which really was pretty cool…. I mean, look at those hippos!!!

“Race,” Profiling, and Deference — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

As most readers of this blog have probably already heard, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. — a professor at Harvard University and arguably the most famous living scholar of African American literature — was recently arrested for disorderly conduct right outside his own house. Gates is somebody whom I have in the past assigned to my students in theory and literature courses, but if you haven’t heard of him, then go ahead and look him up on wikipedia. And if you haven’t already heard what happened to him yesterday, well then here’s some links to various versions of the story: NY Times, Huffington Post, and the official police report.

A couple of things are obvious about this story, but their obviousness may prevent us from noticing what we really should be noticing. One, obviously Gates is correct that none of this would have happened to him if he were white. So, right off the bat we have to acknowledge that some kind of racial profiling was being enacted. Whether or not that was the police officer’s intention is certainly another story, you might say, since he was not actively “profiling” anybody according to any officially mandated procedure. But this other story about intention is of course precisely the story that we should be paying attention to — and we should be paying attention to it for several good reasons, perhaps least of which is that this is exactly the sort of story that Gates has dedicated his whole career to deconstructing.

The title of my blog is an allusion to the very well-known and influential book of essays by various big-name theorists that Gates put together called “Race,” Writing, and Difference, which investigates how the category of race was historically written into being — that is to say, culturally constructed. The important thing to notice here is not that the police officer was a racist, but that the police officer was merely doing his job, and that his job was to respond to the call of Gates’s neighbor, who was merely doing her duty as a concerned citizen. Am I excusing the police officer and the neighbor by suggesting they were just doing what they believed they were supposed to be doing? Not at all. Their behavior was racist to the core, but racist in a complex way. And it’s important to acknowledge this complexity lest we simply start bashing the police or the neighbor… or even Gates.

What isn’t always obvious about racism – but really ought to be – is that racism itself is not obvious. If it were obviously what it is, then it wouldn’t exist, right? Nobody would ever admit to being one of those, but there it is — whether one wants to admit it, it’s there… and we are… because the structures of racism have been so thoroughly “written” into our culture that it affects our everyday reality whether we notice it or not.

Two, the second thing that is obvious here is that Gates flipped out — understandably so. How would you react if a police officer were standing in your house not believing that you were you? And in flipping out, he berated the cop, and in berating the cop he failed to realize what he himself has analyzed so carefully in his scholarship — the complexity and depth of racism in America. In other words, he didn’t realize that it was his own neighbor who had set everything in motion, and instead he accused the cop of being racist.

Now, in my own recent experience, I’ve witnessed a white woman calling the cops on her neighbor who was also in front of his own house, but in this case, the cop who answered the call ignored the caller (as I blogged about a couple weeks ago here). Two differences between the Gates case and my case. First, I witnessed this in a racially diverse, working class neighborhood, not in a fancy-pantsy neighborhood like Cambridge where Gates lives. Second, the Hispanic man showed deference to the cop, and Gates didn’t. What this difference underscores is something about the nature of the housing market and of the exclusive nature of the neighborhood — something we really need to pay attention to when stuff like what happened to Gates happens (and it happens far too often, hence the common pun on DUI — DWB, or “driving while black.”)

And so, my point is that when we read about the po-po putting the cuffs on yet another innocent black man, in addition to reminding ourselves of the depressing statistic that the U.S. has a larger percentage of its population in jail than any other country in the world and that most of them are black, and in addition to reminding ourselves that minorities have culturally had to learn a kind of deference that Gates refused to perform yesterday precisely because he knows all too well that no white person would have had to perform it, we should also remind ourselves that banks and real estate agents have created a society that is more racially segregated now in 2009 than it was before the Civil Rights Act in 1964. And if you don’t believe that’s true, see this study here (or my previous blog post here) that suggests how racism might have exacerbated our recent housing market crisis. The point being, that the neighbor’s neighborly duty is structurally part of the deep nature of how neighborhoods are defined. Her racist action was probably not intended to be so, but rather was an effect of the structure of her neighborhood’s culture.

Three, what is perhaps less obvious is the structure of how one understands one’s role. In this case we have Gates hysterically asserting his authority as a Harvard professor and the cop hysterically asserting his authority as a cop. And then, most importantly perhaps, the role of the crowd outside. Would the cop have arrested Gates if it were not for the fact that a small crowd of people outside had begun to watch the scene unfold before them? If you read the officer’s own report, you will notice that it’s not until he feels the gaze of the crowd upon him that he decides to arrest Gates.

I don’t think we can underestimate two things here. First, we cannot underestimate the significant role of the Other (the crowd) that would force a decisive response from the cop (the arrest). Second, we cannot underestimate the fact that the cop might have unwittingly done exactly the opposite of what the crowd wanted him to do. This indicates some of the complexities of racism all the more, for if the cop at that moment of decision thought he was doing the right thing before the gaze of the crowd but was in fact misunderstanding what was expected, then the nature of “intention” — i.e., the story of intention that I suggested at the begining of this post is THE story we ought be paying attention to — is truly a complicated, contradictory, and beastly nature.

And so when we repeat the seemingly obvious and common-sensical truism that ”race” and “racism” are culturally constructed (a truism that has only become “common sense” within my own short lifetime), we ought to remind ourselves how complicated and strange is the cultural process by which that construction happens.

Nairobi Diaries 5: The Day of the African Child and Obama’s Address to Africa

walking home from school

As I mentioned before in the summary of my itinerary in Kenya [here], probably the most amazing day of my trip was June 16, the International Day of the African Child. I don’t know if this was a serendipitous coincidence or if the organizer of the trip planned it that way, but it was an extraordinarily perfect coming together for me of event and meaning. The Day of the African Child has been a major event throughout Africa for almost twenty years, organized by the Organization of African Unity and The United Nations Childrens Fund. It commemorates the anti-apartheid uprising of students in Soweto in 1976. The students were massacred by the South African government, but the Day of the African Child celebrates the spirit of young people working towards a better world.

roads crowded with children

Because of my experience on this day last month, I was very curious to see what Barack Obama would say this weekend in Ghana [text here] [video here], especially since I experienced the Day of the African Child just a few miles from where Obama’s father once lived. Not surprisingly, he concludes his speech with an appeal to the young people of Africa to hold their leaders accountable and build good institutions. It is common for politicians everywhere in the world to focus on the children to fix the errors of their parents and grandparents. In America children often become either something of a symbolic scapegoat or something the stuff that dreams are made of in these speeches, so I’m usually critical of such rhetoric, but in this particular case, Obama was right to do so, for as he mentioned in his speech, children and youth make up the overwhelming majority of the population in Africa. To see the truth of this, one merely has to take a walk and look around — children were everywhere; middle-aged adults were not. However, while I and so many Africans appreciated Obama’s speech, I had some gut-level problems with it too — gut-level problems that I’m not sure how to parse out. So, I’d like to narrate the amazing experience I had that day and as I go along I’ll see if I can use that experience to theorize a response to Obama.

 

orphanage

To summarize the day in a single sentence, my colleagues and I were taken to several sites by social workers for Catholic Relief Services (CRS): an orphanage, the homes of three men whom CRS was helping, a theatrical competition among students celebrating the day, a parish compound also celebrating, and finally a Savings and Internal Lending Communicty (SILC). As soon as we arrived at the orphanage, a group of the children were paraded out and sang a song for us. In addition to caring for and teaching the children, the nuns raised crops and chickens for food. Most of the children there had lost their parents to AIDS, and I remember one girl who was so malnourished when she was admitted to the orphanage that even now she could still not stand up — her legs were so thin and undeveloped. 

typical farmer's mud home

Later we visited the house of a man and his twenty-year-old son. The man had lost his wife to AIDS, and CRS had helped him build a new home. The man told us the story of his fall and his redemption, and the social workers translated from Luo to English. We then visited another man who told a similar story.

 

telling his story in front of his home

community building a house

The third man we met was really just a boy, age fourteen, who was caring for his little brother after both his parents died and his older brother disappeared. When we visited him, his neighbors were helping him build a new home out of mud and wood. I doubt this boy would have had the opportunity to hear Obama’s speech, much less take his advice to hold the elected officials accountable. But at the same time, he perfectly illustrates Obama’s “yes, we can” message that I saw written at the top of a chalk board in a elementary school classroom in Nairboi. Obama is right that “Africa’s future is up to Africans,” and this boy could be the poster-child of that message. Obama is also right that it needs strong institutions, not corrupt strongmen, but on the other hand, we shouldn’t be surprised if a 14-year-old allies himself with a strongman to survive. As much as we might pretend that democracy is nothing more than transparent elections and accountable bureaucracies, it has also always been a network of strategic, ad hoc alliances. The people we met were allied by necessity, if not also by faith, with CRS — whose recent message [here] to Obama was essentially to continue support for organizations like CRS, because they are both strong and necessary.

Day of African Child competition

After visitng these men, we briefly attended a competition where selected students from various schools in the area were performing songs, dances, and theatrical skits in honor of the Day of the African Child. Our itinerary was tight, so we could only stay for an hour and see a few performances. We had a lunch appointment we were already late for at a parish compound.

audience of competition

 

shaking their shoulder feathers

I think this compound was chosen for us to visit because it contained a CRS sponsored center for distributing antiretroviral therapy (ART) for combatting HIV. But we didn’t have much time to visit that, because when we arrived, a crowd of men, women, and children were in the midst of enjoying a celebration in which young people sang, danced, and recited poetry.

more performances

 

reciting poetry

After lunch at the parish, we got in our trucks once again to visit a Savings and Internal Lending Community (SILC), of mostly women and a few men. A SILC group is not the kind of microfinancing that most Americans have heard about, involving loans from banks or NGOs to individuals and communities. Rather, these men and women lend money to each other, usually just a few dollars here and there — just enough for emergencies and the proverbial “rainy day” (which in Kenya is more like the proverbial drought.)

us with a SILC group

To get to our appointment, we walked along a small trail until we came to a small house made of mud with a lovely view of a valley, and in the shade of a tree sat about forty men and women. We could talk with them about how their community got started, what the benefits as well as the difficulties were, and of course why so many more women than men. They were shy about answering this last one, but finally one man stood up and boldly admitted than men were stubborn and didn’t listen to others. It took me a while before I realized that not only were there fewer men because men were less likely to join such cooperative communities; there were also fewer men because they were more likely to die of HIV for precisely the reasons he gave. It wasn’t until the very end of the meeting were my colleagues and I informed that all the members of this SILC had HIV.

leaders of the SILC

What I’ve so far left out of this blog is my own feelings. I don’t know how to make sense of these. There were too many, and they were too strong. On the previous day, the administrator of a hospital said to me that he would get to heaven before I would, because he’d already been spending time in purgatory. But later, one of my colleagues, a professor of theology, remarked that he felt God’s work was here. Both of these statements resonate strongly, and while one captures the horror, sadness, and struggle of the everyday, the other captures the hope and the joy — because after all, the there was so much beauty. . . the children were dancing on their day. . . but I don’ t know. Any meaning I put on the experience seems to depend on the context I hang around it. Obviously thinking about those contexts and making sense of things is the whole point of my blog, right? But I’m struggling with out to think about this one. Paradoxically, I know this will be one of the most meaningful days of my life, perhaps precisely because I don’t know how to make sense of it.

During the Day of the African Child, I wasn’t thinking about Barack Obama at all, but listening to his speech this weekend, I thought maybe I could make sense of this experience by putting it in dialogue with his speech. That is (I think) one of the other goals of theory — to foster dialogue. My experience has helped me see a tension in Obama’s speech. On the one hand, he encouraged a self-sufficient democracy that is not only transparent and accountable but also organic to its community, but on the other hand, he recognized the unavoidable relationship between African countries and the United States — a relationship that once was colonial but now (Obama hopes) will become more of a partnership. And indeed, words such as “partnership” and “solidarity” are the words CRS also uses.  What these grand conceptualizations seem to miss is the everyday — the often expedient strategies for getting by that the individuals in the SILC as well as the social workers for CRS need to use. Obama was wise enough to recognize this everyday struggle, but it is hard to figure out the relationship between it and his abstract policy. The role of transnational organizations such as CRS is praiseworthy, but it is also peculiar. As the staff of CRS explained to us, their goal is (almost paradoxically) to end the need for CRS — they work towards their own disolution. But if democracy is meant to be an ”enduring institution” derived organically from the people, then where does an NGO like CRS (much of whose funds comes from the U.S. government) fit? And where do these people whom I met, who all look to CRS for help, fit? And why did I have the nagging, creepy feeling that a lot of what I saw was a show put on for the visitors from America — a show put on in expectation of what? What were we all expecting from each other? What were we anticipating? From this vantage point, the abstract notion of corruption so often levelled at African governments is harder to see. Instead, what we see is various people and organizations making do with what they got and making meaning and finding joy where they can.

Nairobi Diaries 4: The Private Security Industry

One night in Nairobi, after watching the play Cut Off My Tongue (which I blogged about before here), my friend and I shared a taxi back. It was about 9:30 pm, and my lodging (owned and run by Catholic nuns from Germany) had a 10 pm curfew, so we came to my place first to drop me off. I didn’t get out of the taxi right away because I hadn’t seen my friend in several years, and we were still chatting. Suddenly, two tall men rapped their knuckles harshly on the taxi window. They wore ill-fitting uniforms, and one was armed with a large automatic rifle, which he held carelessly, while the other had a handgun on his belt. ”What’s the matter?” he asked us. Good question, I thought to myself. My friend answered, “Oh nothing,” and pointing to me, she continued as if this sort of confrontation were nothing unusual, “I was just giving him something.” They turned and walked away.

Who were these men? Soldiers? Police? No, they worked for the private security company hired by several of the residences in that neighborhood, including the place where I was staying. And I want to repeat, the place where I was staying was run by nuns. Considering that the nuns’ compound already had a gate and a security guard, why this extra layer of surveillance and show of force? And why did they have such big, automatic rifles? (The short barrel shotguns used by American police officers are, I would think, a bit more handy for urban environments than large, automatic rifles.)

During my trip, people would always ask me the usual questions: “How are you enjoying your stay?” “What do you like the most?” and finally — and always — “What surprises you most about Kenya?” I usually evaded answering this last question, but I have to say, what surprised me most is the character of security. I am used to thinking of cities as streets with buildings, but that is not what Nairobi is. Rather, it is made up of compounds. One compound after another after another. Residences, shopping malls, offices — you name it — were all gated and guarded, and from what I could tell such armed private security is not only expected, it’s even legally required. I was told by everyone I asked about this never to walk outside the gates… I mean NEVER, whether I was with people or not. Although my “delegation” was staying only a 10 minute walk from one of our destinations, we were driven there (a 15 minute drive, ironically, because of the nature of one-way streets.)

When we went out to the rural areas, things were much different — more relaxed, fewer walls, fewer armed guards. We could walk around… in the daytime… kind of.

So, the constant feeling of risk and danger surprised me, but actually it surprised me only a little. Kenya had just gone through a violent civil conflict, so I expected there to be a lot of security around. What surprised me more was that all of this security was private rather than public. To me, private security seems both more expensive than public (more expensive because less efficient) and also less accountable to whom it is supposedly meant to serve: the people. I talked with one person who had once worked for such a security firm — and it seems typical for young men to earn money for college by working as security guards — and discovered that the security companies are usually European or American.

The fact that these companies are foreign made me want to research this topic further, as the private security industry seems to me to be a very complex phenomenon, and if I had a lot more time, I would. But for now, from a quick search on the internet that I did for the sake of this blog, I found that some books have been written about it.  And from what I can tell, not only has there been a significant increase in private security in Kenya over the past decade or so, but that this increase is worldwide. See here, here, and here. And for those of you who like to play the stock market, note that the financial community considers private security to be a growth industry. See here, here, and here . So um… like, hey… the sooner you invest, the sooner you’ll be able to afford that Caribbean vacation or maybe even save enough money to pay for your child’s college education. Considering that the cost of education is rising right along with the demand for private security… well… hmmm.

I remember reading about the rise in the private security industry around the world since the early 1990s in both of Naomi Klein’s books — No Logo and Shock Doctrine — but I hadn’t realized until now how central the phenomenon is to the processes of globalization. Its centrality seems to me to be significant evidence against the claims of those cheerleaders for free market globalization such as Thomas Friedman (not to mention IMF economists), since it’s an aspect of globalization that Friedman left out of his rather self-indulgent globetrotting tails.  And naturally all of this scares me for quite a number of reasons. First, the corporations are multinational and therefore less subject to the laws of any single government or to the concerns of local communities. Second, they are expensive, and this means that Kenyans are investing less of their money in their own industries or in public infrastructure. Third, unlike the publically run police, private security is for profit — which means (1) that there is a market incentive to increase demand for security and (2) that there is an incentive to reduce the cost of labor. Already, as you can see here, companies are underpaying their security guards, and it doesn’t seem wise to me (or to the Kenyan journalists) to have a lot of underpaid men with machine guns hanging around.

How do we analyze the evidence? Well, it is easy to notice how the growth in the security industry happens side-by-side with its cheapening. But what is less easy to do is to figure out the economic causes of demand — whether such causes are “natural” market forces or artificially fostered. Am I suggesting that such multinational private security corporations actually encourage ethnic violence in order to increase demand? No, that would be a bit paranoid. But it is a paranoia that is shared by many and is becoming the basis for many movies being made these days — a new genre of film that I call the “global thriller” in one of my other blog posts here and in a forthcoming article in a film studies magazine. 

But yes, I do think that the private security industry will exacerbate rather than solve the problem of ethnic violence, and the reason I think that is not because I believe these companies (all based in Europe and America, i.e., the so-called “first world”) are conspiring to provoke violence in the so-called “third world” in order to enrich themselves, but because the day-to-day decisions they make and the priorities they have reflect the wrong mindset. Their priorities will always be profit and the protection of the people who pay them, and not the positive development of the whole community. They are, in a word, evil — not evil by conscious intention as most people understand the word, or even by unconscious intention, but rather by their lack of intention.

Nairobi Diaries 3: Oromo in Kenya

Back to my Kenya trip.

As you may recall from the summary of the trip that I outlined a while back [here], I was able to carve out some time from the official itinerary — so rigorously planned by one of my colleagues —  to visit with some representatives of the Oromo community in Kenya. If you’ve been reading my blog much at all, you know from my previous posts [here], [here], and [here] that I’ve been working with the Oromo community in the United States and Canada for about two years. What you may NOT know is that there is a large Oromo population in Kenya. So, there are two questions that I want to raise for this blog. The first question is one that any Oromo reader would know the answer to already: why are there so many Oromo in Kenya? And the second is more theoretical: why would I be so brazen as to think I could promote Oromo arts in Kenya, and what’s the use of doing so? (The answer to my brazenality question, as well as to the use-value question, may be already obvious to anyone who read my earlier Nairobi Diary post on how to write about ethnic violence in Africa.)

So, to answer the first question, there are basically three categories of Oromo living in Kenya: indigenous, refugee, and immigrant. It may surprise you to learn that there is a large indigenous population of Oromo living in Kenya, but in fact there are many ethnic groups living there, and as we all know, the British Empire drew its colonial boundaries to suit its interests without the least bit of deference to the people already living there. The indigenous Oromo in Kenya are called the Borana, and they moved to the rather arid regions  of  north and northeast Kenya about two hundred years ago as the European powers began colonizing the neighboring areas and as the Abyssinian kings began conquering the rest of Ethiopia. I started reading this book about them a few days before I left for Kenya but haven’t finished it yet. Through the global Oromo network on FaceBook, I got the opportunity to meet with a young man who is a Muslim Borana trying to create an NGO to help develop the communities where he grew up. 

Here is some of the backstory. The Kenyan government discriminates against the Borana because it sees them as outsiders and also because it confuses them with the Somali. This confusion is not surprising since the Oromo and Somali languages are both Cushitic and since many of the Borana have mixed with the Somali there for the past century. (And of course, there is a large Somali population indigenous to northern Kenya as well, so it’s not surprising that when Kenya gained independence in 1963, the majority of people living in the northeast area voted to join with Somalia which had already gained its independence a few years earlier. And of course the British — being British — ignored that vote.) Although more than half the Borana are Muslim, a large percentage are Christian, and a few practice the more ancient Waaqeffannaa. The Kenyan government also believes that the Borana towns provide support and refuge for the Oromo Liberation Front who cross the border to escape the Ethiopian military. So, today the Kenyan government makes little effort to develop that region and inside Nairobi the police sometimes harrass the Borana and Somali. So, the work of this young man whom I met is quite important from a humanitarian perspective because his goal is to promote development by encouraging grassroots civil society in the region.

The refugee population is a bit diferent. They tend to come from other areas inside of Ethiopia. All of the refugees whom I met came in 2002. In 2001, the Ethiopian government brutally suppressed student groups who protested a corrupt election process. Then in January of 2002 the government tried to exterminate all dissent along with the remaining Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). In its attempt to chase down not just the OLF but all forms of it dissent, the government burned down some of the Bale forest where the OLF was supposedly hiding – an environmental tragedy whose real cause was not reported in the Western media as you can see from this BBC report. These refugees fled to neighboring Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, and Kenya, and when the U.S. president George W. Bush asked the Ethiopian government to invade Somalia in December of 2006, presumably to go after al Qaeda terrorists, the Ethiopian government used that opportunity to kill Oromo refugees there. In Kenya, many of the refugees have lived in limbo for the past eight years.  Or rather, they have lived in something like a purgatory. It is illegal for them to work in Kenya, but they can’t leave either, so they can do nothing. Many live in refugee camps on the border, but some live in Nairobi, where they wait year after year for something to change.

Through the Oromo Lutheran church network in the United States, I was able to meet with a woman who works with refugees (not just the Oromo, but all refugees) and tries to help them with their legal problems and find them asylum in the U.S., Canada, etc. Her job is difficult because of course the United Nations refuses to recognize that the Oromo are political refugees and the United States considers the OLF to be a terrorist organization. (This is a curious contradiction — at the same time that the UN understates the political reality, the US overstates it. A whole essay could be written about that contradiction, I think.)  

After talking with her, she arranged for me to go to one of the training sessions for the refugees organized through the church in one of the slums of Nairobi. A member of the church picked me and two of my colleagues up in his taxi and took us there, where we talked with four of the refugees. An hour later I gave a short presentation to a congregation of about 100 people about my work encouraging ”Oromo arts in diaspora.”

The third group is a relatively small group — the legal immigrants living and working in Kenya, such as the person I met who works on behalf of the refugees. Many of them actually came to Kenya not directly from Ethiopia but through other countries like the United States or Germany. They are often middle class, doing business or working for international organizations.

So, the second question for this blog post is, why arts? Most of the Oromo I meet give me a quizical, confused look when I start talking about art and literature. I get the distinct impression that in their minds such artistic endeavors are not so important compared to direct political action, the work of religious institutions, or scholarly efforts to correct the historical record. In fact, when I say I work with literature, almost everyone seems to assume I mean history — something I noticed before in the United States [see here], and noticed again in Kenya.

I think this question can be answered easily. Immediately after I gave my presentation, a young man in the audience came forward and showed me a painting he made shortly after the student uprising and subsequent repression in 2001. As I suggested to my audience that day, art has the ability to help people work through the trauma of history and to develop their cultural identity in response to a changing world. Art also has the ability to communicate across ethnic and political divisions, and therefore it has the ability to tell the human side of Oromo experience to a global audience, to gain recognition for their political struggle.

There is a lot of work to be done. Oromo culture has been largely an oral one, not a written one,  and it has been this way not because of some essential Oromo-ness that privileges oral culture, but  because publishing in their own language was outlawed by the Ethiopian government for most of the twentieth century. In actuality, one of the Oromo heroes is Onesimus Nesib who first translated the Bible into Oromo and thus not only created an Oromo written language but also gave the Oromo a tool for fighting colonization and political oppression. I suppose one could criticize me and suggest that I am imposing Western, middle-class art forms such as the short story and the novel onto their culture, and that as a white guy I have no right to be giving out such advice. But I have little patience for that position. That position assumes an intact, pure Oromo culture, but historically that obviously has not been the case for centuries (if it was ever the case, which I doubt.) It also reaffirms a racialist position that only a member of the ethnic group can understand and speak for that ethnic group. Personally, I agree with the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s critique of that position.

So, onward and upward we go, fostering the kinds of dialogue that I hope will foster art and literature — not art for art’s sake, but art for our sake.

How to Celebrate the 4th of July in Columbia Heights, D.C.

When I was a kid, growing up in one of those infamous Orange County, California suburbs, 4th of July meant BBQ in my backyard and fireworks in the front driveway, fireworks that we had bought in the next town over where they were legal. These fireworks were pitiful things — little tubes that spat out sparkly flame about two or three feet up into the air – but pitiful though they were, I was just eight years old and thought they were cool. Usually my friend’s family came over, and that was also cool. Such was the experience of the suburban child.

Since I’m all grown now and living my own life far away, my parents obviously don’t light fireworks in the front yard anymore; no more fake “oohs” and “ahhs” as they carefully monitor their children dancing about the yard with sparklers. Instead they watch the Boston and New York fireworks on TV accompanied always by the “1812 Overture” and the commentary of some idiot announcer. As for myself, a few times when I lived in cities or visited friends in cities, I would head over to watch those special city-run displays. If I was lucky, I was invited to a friend’s house whose house/apartment had a view of the city fireworks show, so that I could enjoy grilled meat and salty carbohydrates in the sanctity of a private home but still bear witness to the occasion and feel at one with the nation.

Please forgive my sarcastic tone. I know I was supposed to admire the artistry of the pyrotechnics, but usually I was just bored. Every display looked pretty much like every other display I’d ever seen, and something about it felt too controlled… too prophylactic, as if my role in the celebration of freedom had been transformed by an efficient, centralized bureaucratic state apparatus into the role of a entirely passive spectator. The message of such fireworks shows seemed to be that “independence” is to be watched, not re-enacted. My pyromaniac instincts could hardly be satisfied by mere watching.

In the Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods of Washington D.C., things are a bit different. This year, I’m spending all of July in these neighborhoods to enjoy some time with friends and use the city’s fabulous libraries. If you’re unfamiliar with D.C. or have only experienced its many monuments, museums, and government buildings as a tourist, then I probably have to explain my nation’s capitol city to you before I explain what was so excellent about its 4th of July. Away from the tourist attractions and government offices, D.C. is a fascinating mix of cultures. In a sense, D.C. is both the least American of American cities and the most American at the same time.  Ironically, the very thing that makes it feel different from the rest of America is also the thing that makes it the most iconically American — its international culture, its free-thinking and tolerant liberalism, its mixture of working-class and professional-class populations. For instance, the tiny neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant is exactly one third white, one third black, and one third Latino, and though certainly a lot of this mixture is due to past waves of migration and recent gentrification, I don’t think it is another example of the typically tragic gentrification story. In contrast to the version of gentrification narrated in this recent novel by the DC-raised/Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu, the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood association actively tries to follow the enlightenment principles of the social contract to make this uneasy mixture work for everyone.

So, how does one properly celebrate the 4th of July in Columbia Heights? Does one take the subway to the enormous National Mall and watch the fireworks burst over the Washington monument? No, of course not, unless you are a tourist. Rather, if you are a native (or wanna-be native), you grab a bottle of cheap champagne from the fridge, and shortly before the sun has set completely, crawl out of the window of the top story of your friend’s row house and up a make-shift ladder to the roof.  There you will inevitably discover other like-minded souls dancing without much sense of rhythm to Chicano hip hop on pirate radio. What could be more in the spirit of “independence” day than pirate radio or Chicano hip hop? Once it gets completely dark, then the magic begins — not a single display of fireworks like you find on TV, but a whole city-wide panorama of pyromania. You can look in any direction and see rockets bursting over the rooftops. Immediately below you, wherever you happen to be, a car will inevitably pull up with a trunkload of rockets and begin shooting them right over your heads, and inevitably one of the white 30-something professional-class neighbors will come outside, angrily shake a finger, and call the police on this somewhat brown-skinned man, not realizing that he, his wife, kids, and other relations are firing them from the steps of their own house and that the police will merely ask him not to double park his car next time. From the rooftop, you and your friends will of course cheer for your pyrotechnically skilled neighbor and hurl insults at the complaining hater.

I enjoyed this Independence Day more than I have enjoyed any in the past. Maybe it sounds a little sappy, but I felt like I was actively celebrating a human desire for freedom and not passively consenting to an empty and chauvenistic national pride.