Dear Dr. Nyairo

Ten years ago, you telephoned informing me that you were launching a book entitled Kenya@50: Trends, Identities and the Politics of Belonging. The book was interrogating Kenya after 50 years of the state project called independence. You requested me to read the book and be a panelist at the book launch. You were so committed to me participating, that you gave me a photocopy of the entire manuscript pending the arrival of the printed copies. In these days of copyright infringement, that was a great risk you took on me. 
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I did not deserve it.

​Keynote address to the 2025 Comic Arts Festival, 14 March 2025
Kenya National Library, Nairobi

​Thank you for this invitation. I was not sure whether I am the appropriate person to address the theme of using comics for learning. The reason is simple: I am a great critic of the new school system, and especially of its treatment of the arts. And from my struggle to articulate the issues with the school system, I learned that the philosophy of education and knowledge in Kenya is deeply, deeply flawed. That said, I understand my role here to be to explain how the visual arts, and specifically comics, can intervene in the school system by introducing fun to teaching and learning. 

It’s me again. In my last letter, I talked about how our education system destroys the arts by corrupting the meaning of education, work and the arts. And I said that these lies which are perpetuated in the name of education come from the unholy and abusive marriage between education and business (I have said elsewhere that this marriage should be immediately annulled).

In this letter, I’m going to talk about how capitalist business is the prime beneficiary of the terrible state of the arts in Kenya. 

Dear Kenyan artist

In my previous letter, I talked about how the arts are a divine calling. The arts make us human, because the arts provide a space for us to be social and individual at the same time. With the arts, we accept what we can’t change and change what we can, while producing something creative and sometimes new.
 
Let me give an example of what I mean. The rituals we perform when someone we love dies help us accept death as something we all must face. However, we cannot raise our hands and say death is inevitable, because if we do, we would not have reason to live our lives to the fullest. So the arts is where we deal with that contradiction. When Amos and Josh sang “Tutaonana baadaye,” they are singing “we accept your going is inevitable, but until we join you, we must still live our best lives, love with all our hearts.” And from this deep truth, Amos and Josh and King Kaka produced a beautiful song. 

​That’s what the arts are – beauty that carries deep truth.

Dear Kenyan artist

This is an open letter to all of us Kenyans who do not behave like Jonah who tried to evade his divine calling to preach God’s message in Nineveh.

​I know that I speak for many when I say that in Kenya, the arts sector is abusive. To enter it is not for the faint hearted, and few of us come out of it intact. Many of us, myself included, have experienced of depression or panic attacks. A number of us are shot in the neck or are victims of rape. And each time the violence happens, the public winks and says we should have seen it coming. They say that we brought it on ourselves by talking, dressing or thinking differently.

Theater scholar Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ writes that in 1991, at the height of the clamour for multi-partyism, the government denied a license for the staging of a play “Drumbeats of Kirinyaga,” by Oby Obyerodhiambo.

​The reason given was that the play portrayed an ethnically diverse and politically cohesive Kenya, which contradicted the president’s argument at the time that Kenya was too ethnically divided for multi-partyism.
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While President Moi was claiming to care for Kenyans who are too tribal, his government was ironically also suppressing any public display of Kenyans transcending their tribal identities. The government needed to encourage tribalism among Kenyans in order to give itself something to cure.

In 2009, Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist, caught the world by storm with her book Dead Aid, in which she argued that foreign aid does not deliver the development that it promises to Africa.

Dr. Moyo is as mainstream as they come: she was educated at Harvard and Oxford, she speaks impeccable English, does most of her speaking circuit in the West.

And her idea was not new. Africans have questioned foreign aid since independence, because of the strings attached to foreign aid. They have said that our economic dependence on the same people who enslaved and colonized us essentially meant we were not truly independent.

​What was different about Dambisa Moyo?