It's Our Turn to Eat (19 page)

Traditionalists shake their heads, seeing the threat of dissolution. ‘Let Sheng be left to matatu touts, drug pushers, hopeless hip-hop musicians and school dropouts,' argued a columnist in the
Standard
, slamming it as ‘linguistic jingoism'. But the dialect probably represents exactly the opposite, a force for national unity. Supporters point out that whereas Kiswahili and English were brought to Kenya by Arab traders and English settlers, Sheng was an indigenous invention. ‘At last, here is something truly ours for once, which unites us, and which we haven't inherited,' wrote a defender. As a language of the
poor embraced by children of the elite, as anxious to sound trendy on the playing fields of their private schools as any slum urchin, it is a class leveller. Writer Binyavanga Wainana sees Sheng as the expression of a youth revolution which militates against the sharp tug at the ethnic heart-strings many Nairobi residents experience with the onset of maturity. ‘As you get older, entering into marriage and having children seems to tribalise you. All those ceremonies, marriage arrangements, land issues; those decisions about which language to bring your children up in and which school to attend; they activate something in people they didn't know they had.

‘Sheng has given us all a safe language to speak. There's a kind of hopefulness to it, a feeling of establishing a sensibility which encompasses tribe, is working-class, inward-looking, philosophical.' Perhaps, on a continent in which identity and language are so interlinked, in which almost every African seems to have mastered four or five languages; and with each language, four or five different ways of interacting with others, only Sheng, with its rich, shifting mix of associations, can express the kaleidoscopic entity that is the modern Kenyan.

If the Sheng generation is more streetwise, technologically savvy and sexually knowing than its elders, it also has a radically different awareness of its rightful place in the world. As the Kenyan middle class expanded, so did the numbers of youngsters sent abroad to complete their training. Parents dispatched their offspring hoping they would learn how the world worked and win the keys to Western-style prosperity. But those who return–and a disconcertingly high proportion choose not to–look at their continent and their kith and kin with the pitiless, unforgiving eyes of the youthful idealist. They have done the maths, they understand economics and have read the newspapers. They are all too aware of how much better things work elsewhere, painfully conscious of the extent to which, in foreigners' minds, Africa is logged in the ‘basket case' category. And for that they blame the very people who paid for their eye-opening educations.

 

Conrad Marc Akunga, who I met in early 2006, was one example of the young iconoclasts springing up in modern Kenyan society. Tall and skinny, with the awkwardness of an overgrown swot, he looks exactly what he is: a computer geek with an instinctive empathy for the world of gigabytes and downloads. A blogger on Kenyan affairs, he met up with Ory Okolloh, a female graduate of Harvard Law School, in the wake of the 2002 elections, as disillusionment set in. Together they decided to set up www.mzalendo.com, a website aiming to make Kenya's parliament more answerable to voters. One of the incoming MPs' first acts was to hike their own salaries, making them among the best-paid parliamentarians in the world, let alone Africa. Furious civil society groups pointed out that while the lawmakers benefited from monthly earnings 270 times the average, Kenya's parliament, in terms of days attended and bills passed, was one of the least productive on the planet. ‘Ory and I used to get together and rant: it was “these guys, these guys, these guys”,' says Marc. ‘It got to the point where over breakfast one day we agreed to take action. The first thing we needed was information about who “these guys” were.' Out of the desire to do something other than whinge, the idea for Mzalendo–‘patriot' in Kiswahili–was born.

Originally modelled on the Westminster system, Kenya's 222-seat parliament is in theory transparent to the public. One form this openness is supposed to take is the Kenyan version of Hansard, the written transcript of parliamentary proceedings. In fact, parliamentary officials treat access to Hansard as a privilege rather than a right, and the paper transcript is, of course, of little use to rural voters wanting to know what their MP gets up to in the capital. ‘These guys talk loud in public, but what they do inside that chamber isn't known,' says Akunga. ‘Some have never once spoken in parliament. It's your right, as a voter, to know that.' The website gave, when it could, profiles of MPs, a rundown of their educational qualifications (often a sensitive subject), details of which committees they sat on and which motions they proposed. It provided telephone numbers and postal addresses, allowing dissatisfied constituents to pester their elected representatives in person.

Its two founders launched the project with only token assistance from donors. With no staff and no premises, Mzalendo didn't actually need money, Akunga told me, demanding instead time and commitment. Akunga, whose day job was with a Nairobi software company, provided the technical knowhow. Ory, who had moved to South Africa, focused on content, cajoling parliamentary officials into providing back copies of Hansard.

Mzalendo, it has to be said, will never be a You Tube favourite–it is far too worthy to make for gripping reading. But in the duo's eyes, the four-to-six-hundred daily hits the website gets justify its existence. The two hope to counteract what they see as a national tendency to tut-tut briefly over human folly, give a resigned shrug, and move on. It is a characteristic that gave exploiters an easy ride, allowing a small group of players to circulate like soiled clothes in a washing machine. Jumping from party to party, campaigning against policies they championed until recently, politicians rely on general amnesia to survive one scandal after another. ‘Kenyans tend to forget easily and forgive easily; it takes just a few weeks. We hope the website will work against that.'

Most MPs have done their best to ignore the website. That indifference reinforced Akunga's cynicism towards lawmakers, who he blames for a steady poisoning of the political climate. ‘If Kenya is ethnically polarised today, it is these guys who are at the root of it. You grow up in Nairobi and you play with everyone and then at university you suddenly start hearing people say, “They're out to get us.” If the MPs just shut up, we'd sort it out, but instead they keep fanning the flames. Even educated fellows, professors, say the most unsavoury things quite openly. They seem to forget that microphones have memories.'

The project was an example of how one expectation feeds another, furtive hopes mutating into strident demands as the citizen's sense of what is his due expands. Akunga got his first heady taste of political activism in the 2002 elections, when the boss of his software company designed a programme to collate the results, a plan hatched to prevent vote-rigging. Party officials rang in from the constituen
cies with the tallies, and staff immediately typed them into the computer. ‘We worked all through Christmas, working till 4 o'clock in the morning, working so hard we didn't even have time to go out and vote ourselves,' recalls Akunga. ‘I remember when the votes came in and we saw the final result, I had this amazing feeling: that we had played our part in bringing that about, we had done our bit. There was this incredible sense of euphoria.' That intoxicating experience had carried all the emotional force of a religious conversion. Mzalendo.com was Akunga's attempt to keep the novel sensation of being part of something bigger and better than himself alive.

 

Akunga's irreverence was magnified twenty times in another Kenyan who seemed to represent what was to come. I'd first heard of Caroline Mutoko at a lunch in Muthaiga. A guest was complaining about a verbal lashing a colleague had been subjected to on Kiss FM, one of the capital's popular radio stations, by what sounded like a razor-tongued virago. A government minister joined in: he too had borne the brunt of the harridan's ire. He enjoyed a reputation as something of a progressive, so I was surprised to hear him casually mention that he had tried, without success, to persuade Kiss's management to take the presenter off the air. He shook his head. ‘It's beyond a joke. She simply goes too far. The woman has to be stopped.' This Bitch from Hell, I thought, was definitely someone I wanted to meet.

I told Mutoko the story when I met her, and she gave a mirthless laugh. ‘There's not a politician who likes me. Not one.' She shrugs. ‘And I don't mind. They are all extremely charming when they meet me in person, but I know that behind my back they're saying: “Oh my God, get her oesophagus.”'

Manicured, carefully coiffed and sporting the very latest thing in sunglasses–a ‘parasite' model which clung to the face rather than hooking round the ears–Mutoko carried with her the near-visible aura of celebrity. She is not a big woman, but gives off an air of ineffable self-confidence, much of which can be traced to the timbre of her voice. Many Nairobi broadcasters speak a very Kenyan form of English, with the stress placed on syllables no Briton emphasises. Not
Caroline. Her English has the crisp precision of a Kenyan Joanna Lumley, a quality she attributes to the Irish nuns at her school who made their pupils read long passages aloud. As warm as chocolate, low, smooth, self-assured, hers is a voice perfect for radio, letting her listeners know they are among friends.

It is such a purr that the violence of the sentiments it expresses are doubly shocking. Mutoko talked, over a lit cigarette, about wanting to slap politicians in the face, of being ‘pissed off' by the powers that be and of ‘butchering' those who dared repeat ‘the same old crap' on her programme. Transposed to the airwaves, the approach, in a country hamstrung by etiquette, has won her the status of one of America's ‘shock jocks'. Like them, she sometimes appals even her most fervent fans. Like them, she is simply too entertaining to miss, and her
Big Breakfast Show
is one of Kenya's most popular.

She'd migrated to Kiss FM after becoming exasperated by the triviality of her job at rival Capital FM, where she was ‘an expert on Robbie Williams, and there was
nothing
I didn't know about the Spice Girls'. Neither Capital nor Kiss would exist had it not been for Moi's reluctant liberalisation of the airwaves in the mid-1990s, a move which marked the waning of the deference my piqued fellow guests in Muthaiga felt was their due. ‘We live in a country where people in power don't realise they are actually public servants,' says Mutoko. ‘When you're a politician in Kenya you're used to grovel, grovel, “honourable”, “honourable”. You expect to be treated like a demigod, so it's very hard when people say, “Screw you.” This is a scary time for politicians.'

Talking to Mutoko, one sensed a roiling, restless fury, a huge impatience finding expression after years of control. She sees herself as mouthpiece for an entire nation whose patience has snapped. ‘This country is on such an amazing high it can't be stopped. Kenya is awakening. I can hear it in the phone calls we get. People ring and say, “This road has been worked on since September, it's now March”…They call in to bitch about not having water for three days, not having power. That never used to happen before. We've become a whole lot more questioning. You can't sell me shit.'

Like Mzalendo's founders, much of Mutoko's bolshiness lies in her awareness that Kenyans, through their passivity, have contributed to their downfall. ‘Half our problem in the media was that we self-censored. You self-censor and then you wake up one day and realise the way things are is your fault.'

Convinced that an ossified political class was trailing far behind its public, Mutoko, when I interviewed her in April 2006, was encouraging young people with no previous experience to stand in the next elections. Prospective candidates, including youngsters from Nairobi's slums, were invited onto Kiss FM to explain their manifestos. It was a high-risk strategy: ‘But I would gamble anything on difference. I already know what your track record is,' she said, rhetorically addressing a member of the old guard, ‘and it's crap. Your track record is garbage.'

A Kamba by birth, Mutoko should in theory have been rooting for Kalonzo Musyoka, former foreign minister, presidential aspirant, and a fellow tribesman. ‘People stand next to me in bars and whisper: “If Musyoka gets in, you know as a Kamba you could get a good position, because it's our time.”' In fact, she scorned an approach which would have made a nonsense of the meritocratic principles on which she had based her career. ‘The whole “our time to eat” line is the worst thing that ever happened to Kenya. You'd like to find the first person who ever used it and drive a stake through their heart.'

It was impossible to separate Mutoko's political stroppiness from what was, essentially, a feminist itinerary, one that appeared to have largely despaired of the African male. Single and childless, she was immensely proud of the fact that she lived in a house paid for by her salary and boasted a share portfolio built from her earnings. ‘I'm a Nairobi woman who has finally found my feet and my voice. I'm not looking for anyone to complete me.'

Leaving Mutoko that day, a sudden image came to mind: of a tightrope walker who has never experienced a serious fall, stepping forward without a net. Chin up, back straight, the acrobat gazed into the middle distance, never looking down. ‘The day I give in to the fear, I might as well resign,' she had told me when I asked about a
court case a minister had brought against the station. The velvet-toned presenter, I suddenly realised, was one of the few people I'd met who simply didn't seem to know the meaning of the word.

 

By demanding that Kenya's multi-party democracy should possess substance as well as form, Mutoko, Akunga, Okolloh and their ilk were taking on an entire school of political thought about Africa. Their convictions challenged those cynics who dismissed John Githongo's anti-corruption efforts as the naïve projection of inappropriate ‘
mzungu
' values onto an African nation where they were doomed to fail. If John was a ‘coconut', he certainly wasn't the only coconut in Kenya.