“The scene from his hotel room screen in Nakuru still fills his mind. Let’s call him M. He’s from Muranga, he still drives the Datsun 120 Y that he bought in 1972 when he was a 22-year -old boy, and he’s got a family in the outskirts of Eldoret where his wife runs the family farm (cows and wheat) that he bought in 1982 from a white man, fleeing the coup d’etat that never happened ...”
Those were the first words I wrote in my story ‘The Road to Eldoret’ almost exactly seven years ago, when Kenya began burning in what we have now acronymed as the ‘PEV’.
Writer Daudi Were had just formed a google-group called the ‘Concerned Kenyan Writers’ (CKW). And the idea was to bring the country’s creative community together in this virtual space to see if we could use our writing skills to stop the county burning (many of us writers truly believe that that the pen is mightier than the sword. That our words will stop a bullet’s trajectory, poetry halt tragedy; hence the unfortunate death of Christopher Okigbo in the Biafra war in 1967).
CKW was created to stop the polarisation of Kenya along ethnic lines following the General Election of 2007, and January fracture of the fabric of the nation.
Before that, there was ‘champagne socialising’ among the country’s literati in glittering events where writer folk met, winked, nudged, smiled and drank in polite society, occasionally throwing in the ‘Ukoo Flani Mau Maus’ from Dandora to give the occasion authentic ghetto flavour, bow wow!
But even at the Goethe in early November of 2007, as we launched my poetry book ‘What If I’m a Literary Gangster?’ and commemorated the 12th anniversary of the killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa by the murderous Nigerian dictator, Sani Abacha, one could sense the allegiance to tribal loyalty that ‘miraculously’ occurs every five years here.
Bubbles threatening to become fissures that would become nation-wide rifts and fractures that would tear the country apart in a short seven weeks as blood got spilled, and the country super-polarised.
CKW brought together the media, academics and the creative artists together under a virtual umbrella – journalists like Rasna Warah, poets like Stephen D Partington and a core of returnee academics who had been teaching in foreign spaces, some for near quarter a century, and who in retrospect might have been a mite out of touch with the country’s social dynamics, but were nonetheless armed to provide those in CKW who had ‘Not Really Ever Left Kenya’ with teachable moments, and school them in ‘How to Speak Properly.
There would be a price to pay for the ‘reluctant and disobedient students’ who refused to conform to their language, learnt at the feet of the white wo/man, yes.
But this was still at least five years in the future.
First, there was Kenya to save, then we did all sorts of wonderful things like ‘Koroga’ (pictures and poetry) and by the country’s 50th anniversary, some of them had even dared ‘Re-Imagine Kenya.’
And it is perhaps then, but I am not sure, when the rain began beating us at CKW in 2012, the steep slip downwards and into the deadly dark.
I now think that with the December of 2012 project ‘Remembering Kenya’ at an end, some of the CKW academics began to feel at loose ends, some of the poets not engaged in meaningful creative work outside of Internet spaces increasingly irrelevant.
There they were, in CKW, shouting into the wind, shooting into the air, and the rage of their own irrelevance irreversibly leading them down the dark path where the Orwellian pig becomes the Oppressor.
These Politically Correct Fascists in our writing community began to import and evoke the language of victimhood in CKW.
To do that, they had to create politically incorrect hoodlums within the virtual space, google hobgoblins and labels like ‘tribal revisionist’ ‘media misogynist’ and ‘you are white and can never understand’ began to fly about, with some of the targeted, mostly male figures, wisely electing out of the fray.
Being the open, some may even say slightly naïve, creative I am, I stayed on in CKW, taking them on, alone, even in the face of language like they were ‘bringing a knife to a fight in the kitchen.’
Then a non-incident at an afternoon poetry meeting in September changed everything.
Premised on a fictitious narrative, and invoking the charged language of ‘sexual harassment’, some members of the so-called Concerned Kenyan Writers embarked on a gleeful Twitter campaign aimed at the professional destruction of this writer (sourced on two year virtual differences), pressing ‘Send’ and ‘Re-Tweet’ with the abandon of Drone Age war-makers in Virginia who kill real men, women and children in Afghanistan, and call them ‘Splats.’
Except that real life is not a Nintendo video game.
When an educated CKW member invites the public to lynch an individual unheard in the name of ‘restorative justice’ where he is judge, jury and executioner, he is no different than a Sungu Sungu vigilante in Gusii-land, looking to burn an old woman alive, calling her a witch.
When so-called intellectuals engage in the attempted reputation stripping of one of their own outside of the law, then, lo and behold, are they not as loutish as the street touts of Embassava?
Just because the latter live in Korogocho and they live in leafy places does not make their mens rea different.
Orwell’s pigs
Complete with silent witnesses and re-tweets no different than sending the humiliating pictures of those poor molested ladies, making them go viral.
The award-winning writer Parsalelo Kantai recently said we are now living in the ‘Age of insinuations and innuendo.’
He demonstrated this with a story of how he was recently in London, and a certain lady academician invited him up to her apartment to pick an X Mas parcel she wanted brought back to her relative.
They went and split a bottle of wine as they spoke.
Then she veered off into the topic of ‘useless Kenyan men.’ At that point, Kantai upped and left in a huff. The next day he was at Heathrow, bound back for Nairobi.
On the way from JKIA, he is reading a mail thread send to sixty of their mutual friends saying he ‘got drunk and behaved aggressively towards her in her apartment at three in the morning.’
And the NGOs, some of which the State is suspending, some have lost all credibility.
I actually found myself nodding when the president, after the ICC could not proceed with the case against him said: “There is no justice when human rights clubs conspire to betray (real) victims of abuse and persecute the innocent.”
As the KGB used to say, ‘she lies like an eyewitness.’
Daniel Waweru, among the first to be a victim of the virtual CKW space has said: ‘Members of the group have accused each other of extraordinarily ugly things, and some of these disputes are headed to court.’ It is no longer a community of writers but a balkanized zone of hatreds.
Yet of the 222 members (I formally asked to be removed from the group recently), less than a dozen are regular contributors (I suspect most of the others stay there for the sordid entertainment the meaningless exchanges there provide).
In my opinion, the horror of irrelevance for the most shriek-prone members of this group has led them to be in opposition to everything, and to create nothing at all.
Writers write books, produce important academic papers, not police thought on Internet spaces whose traffic cannot be spotted by a fat traffic cop if it smacked into his potbelly.
Having refused to be ‘schooled by the Diaspora’ here (who found out even Kenyan public spaces have their ‘owners’ who have slaved to earn these fields), the typology of debate on CKW degenerated until it became ‘twitter hologram’ hollow theories that fit perfectly into nothing at all in the Kenyan psyche.
So I have arrived at the conclusion that spaces like these have little to offer. The serious public intellectual will never lack space in mainstream media. The serious writer private publishing opportunities like Goethe’s Contact Zone books. The serious academics, like Professor Wanjala in PEN, invites to mentor and address.
Only the Incompetent hide in tiny virtual spaces where they can be vituperative vipers against the innocent in a pit of serpents camouflaged as a community of concerned creatives, yet they create nothing, and use these spaces as bully pulpits.
One of the CKW members, Kenne Mwikya, asked me to stay on CKW so that we can continue to honestly ‘call each other out.’
As a writer, I find this game churlish, childish even. And far prefer to go with the writer Al Kags who said, ‘kilicho na mwanzo, basi lazma kina mwisho.’
Perhaps, seven Decembers down the line, this CKW has outlived its usefulness; and it is time to call it a day.
— tonyadamske@yahoo.com
