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.

I grew up knowing that in Kenya, it was a crime to ask questions. I was bullied in primary school for my “big mouth.” In high school I was blasted for being like my father. At church I was reprimanded repeatedly for literal blasphemy, and I still am, any time I cried out “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

But even as I endured this humiliation, I always knew that the one place to ask questions in Kenya was the university. Yes, I knew that Micere Mugo, ES Atieno Odhiambo, Willy Mutunga, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and many others had suffered for exercising intellectual freedom. I knew that university students had been jailed and killed for demanding democracy and authentic education. I knew that police hated students and would beat us at any chance. 

Very rarely do I speak publicly about my family and my relationship with my father, because I am an intensely jealous daughter. I refuse to share my relationship with my father with the public, because our lives were public already, both due to my father’s career as a church minister but also due to the political positions he took.
 
When I was young, I often used to be asked what it felt like to be a pastor’s child. I would reply that I don’t know, because I only know him as “Dad.” I learned to do that from my mother who constantly refused the label “pastor’s wife.” She argued that that label was used to the disregard the clergy as workers who needed to be treated decently because they too had families. Unlike the posperity gospel churches, the PCEA sometimes treats clergy like TSC treats teachers, posting them at the drop of a hat with little consideration about what the relocation means for their families. So I learned from my mother to protect my relationship with my father.

With the colonial ideology of order, and without a tribal elite to implement it, like the elite handed over to Kenyatta by the colonial government, Moi maintained the colonial and exploitative state by crushing alternative spaces of imagination in the same way his predecessors had done, but with more cruelty. As the saying goes, every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

​(Long read)

I have always had a tortured relationship with Daniel arap Moi, the second president of Kenya. I was in primary school when I first became conscious of him, because of the school milk that we drank. As I became a teenager, I was aware of the world my parents lived in, trying to forge a better Kenya, and Moi using the leadership of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), to persecute them. 
​
But there was still a sense in which I was distanced from the cause of my parents’ struggles. When I was in form 2 or form 3 (I can’t remember), Moi visited our school and I asked him for an autograph, and he was gracious and wrote that he wished me a bright future. The next Monday, our headmistress blasted the entire school about lack of respect for an elderly statesman. But who cared? Not me. 

Boris Johnson’s new mandate in the UK feels increasingly familiar. There is a pattern between governments in Kenya, US and the UK. It’s the politics of the single issue.

From ICC, to MAGA (Make America Great Again) to CBC, to Brexit to huduma namba, and to BBI, all instances unite in politicians are hoodwinking citizens on single issues that camouflage multiple reforms that will destroy social services and suppress citizens’ rights. And these reforms are all linked to the interests of mostly Anglo-Saxon billionaires.

ICC was made the pet issue by Kenya’s current president during his 2013 campaign, and it was on the advice of a British PR company. Muigai’s supporters, especially from the Kikuyu community, were hoodwinked into believing that voting for ICC suspects was voting against imperialism. The irony was that the strategy came from imperialists.

Brexit is the same as MAGA. It is about gutting down environmental protections, protecting zero contract hours for workers, austerity and tax breaks for the 0.1%. The British were told lies that the EU caused all that, and the Remain campaign was too weak in countering those lies. That has meant that the conversation has been so dominated by Brexit, that by the time Labour tried to talk about the real issues, it was too late.