News broke in February this year that Kenyan actor Lenana Kariba was on Netflix’s Bridgerton, a show watched all over the world. Amidst the widespread celebration and show of goodwill by Kenyans for one of their own, two themes emerged. First, that of the continuing normalization of being excited by Western validation, and second, that Kenyan soil is toxic for creatives; it is the place where dreams wither and die.
If the ‘making it big’ and breaking into the international scene trend (as seen with Lupita Nyong’o, Eddy Gathegi, Owiso Odera, Mary Oyaya, and others) is the biggest trope we find in the creative scene, the second biggest is that of the broke, depressed, discouraged, drunken and dysfunctional artist.
The high of a new creative having broken out on the scene is followed months later by the heart-breaking news of the falling from glory to grass of a former ‘great’ in the creative industry. Pictures and videos of the wretched state of this creative are shared online, their past glories are remembered and cried about. Kenyans quickly set up a Paybill Number and send money to the person in question. Until the next time this fate befalls yet another artist.
This is likely why the hearing of another creative breaking into the international arena is such a big deal. It gives hope that one more person has escaped the matrix.
The very idea of making a living as an artist was seen as a madness until the early 2000s, upon the emergence of artists such as Nameless, Amani and Wahu. Nazizi’s 1996 song ‘Ni Sawa Tu’ depicted the struggles late Gen Xers and early millennials wanting to get into the arts faced, starting from their very own households. Upon the character in the song informing her parents of her dreams to be a rapper, she is met with alarm, discouragement and predictions of failure. “Mtoto we umenishinda…. Je ukishindwa?…. Acha kuwa mjinga.” The rejection was not just at household level; it was in the wider sphere. A year before Nazizi’s song release, Kalamashaka had been booed offstage for rapping in Swahili and sheng.
Over the years, much as artists have put in effort to be sufficient and make a living off their creativity, the structures for their thriving remain absent. 25 years after the pursuit of a law to formalize and fund the creative sector, none still exists. The exhaustively worked on Creative Economy Support Bill still languishes in Parliament.
Sufficient infrastructure that would enable artists to work – theatre spaces, dance studios, art galleries, concert halls, cinema halls – remain absent, outside of the one or two state-owned and the few Western-sponsored or Western-owned establishments. This is in the major cities, so imagine the bigger vacuum in the rest of the country. There is little or no public funding for the arts, there are no national endowments or grants. Artists are left to stumble across the wild wild west of capitalism with no help or support.
This is not accidental; it is by design. Imperialism only thrives when the will of the entity has been taken captive and is operating under the dictates of the overseer. It is similar to a narcissistic relationship. Only a person whose will has been beaten down and lost their soul can remain connected to a narcissist.
The arts are the soul of the nation. The conscience, the nerves, the will. They transmit hope, possibility and vision. Yet one of the first things colonial administrators did was criminalize local art, local herbal and medicinal knowledge and culture. They derided cultural practitioners as witches, they termed local art, dance, music and religion devilish and demonic. Creatives are the descendants of this group of people that were suppressed in this way – the witchdoctors, the prophets, the rain makers, the medicine women, the spiritualists, the dancers, the diviners, the praise singers.
For colonialism to succeed, it had to suppress and kill the soul of Kenya. Later post-independence governments took the same stance, viewing artists as nothing but valueless trouble makers. This is why some of the best Kenyan creatives ended up detained and exiled under Daniel arap Moi’s and Jomo Kenyatta’s rule (Ngugi wa Thiong’o, D.O Misiani, Micere Mugo, Joseph Kamaru).
But the soul was never killed, it never died. It just went into hiding. This hiding still manifests in the form of all the depression and mental illness that abounds in the creative sector today. The creative sector remains under this psychic rejection that imperialism, colonial and post-colonial rule subjected it to. This is why some of our best artists are drunk, dysfunctional, penurious, suicidal and lost in substance abuse.
We need to hold a national ceremony to officially apologise to members of the creative sector. We need to make burnt sacrifices to appease their ancestors of yore who were harassed, attacked, reviled, humiliated and rejected for the role they played in the social body. We need to atone for the psychic exile and ostracism this group of people have been subjected to their whole lives, even without knowing. And if the government does not do it, creatives will have to do it themselves.
