Writers in search of a nation

Kahora prefaces the question by scouring the literary landscape for war lit and war characters — the child soldiers that have populated much of new West African literature this decade, as well as older ones such as Ken Saro Wiwa’s Soza Boy. He rejects them, rightly pointing out that they cannot retell the story of the PEV.

In a later response to this question, Marjorie Oludhe-Macgoye says: “In fact, the consciousness of violence is present is most Kenyan novels and drama, even where it is not the main theme, but we have often shirked the communal aspects of conflict. After all, what happened in January was neither unprecedented nor unanticipated.”

Marjorie cites a body of Kenyan writing — both fiction and non-fiction — going back 40 years, in which the awareness of ethnic diversity (if not tension) is always a running theme.

It could be added that the themes of betrayal of the nationalist ideals, the emergence of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wabenzi, the corrupt politician-businessman who has been such a feature of Kenyan life; as well as the street life of inequality and suspicion in the works of such writers as Meja Mwangi, Henry ole Kulet and Charles Mangua, all presaged the PEV.

For Mwangi and Mangua, Nairobi was often written as a script for a “blaxploitation” 1970s movie.

But the speed and sourness of urban life, while refusing to refer directly to politics, could not be avoided, and in fact was the reason the city seemed to teem with such rootless, restless souls.

In Henry ole Kulet, a prolific writer to whom sufficient attention has not been paid, you must reinvent yourself, erase your past, to become one of the new men. But in playing the game, you corrupt the “authentic.” It will invariably come back to bite you.

This circular destiny, and the suggestion that we cannot run away from the past, contains much of what the crisis was about: A country of two tribes, a tiny minority in the throes of Amos Kimunya’s 7 per cent growth and a silent majority, made invisible by their exclusion from the ambitions of the elite. The PEV was about their un-silencing.

It is what the academic Paul Goldsmith, in an illuminating essay in the first volume of the current Kwani?, describes as a “black swan event” — an unexpected event with extreme consequences whose explanation, in retrospect, suggest that its causes were there all along.

Editor Billy Kahora hinged this double-volume of Kwani? on the idea — hinted at in those two earlier questions — that the PEV needed to be thoroughly documented.

The form he has chosen to do this is creative non-fiction — a journalism that borrows heavily from elements of fiction in order to more accurately tell the story.

Assembling a team of young writers in November 2007, Kwani? sent them off to various constituencies to narrate the election story. There were of course few signs in that November that the stories they would return with would be so explosive.

The result is a closely observed and tightly woven street-level account of the December elections.

Two stories in particular, Arno Kopecky’s “Hustle N.’GO” about a former street-kid turned politician campaigning for councillor in Dagoretti constituency, and Mwangi “”Mwas” Mahugu’s “Habari” stand out.

Kopecky tells the sweet-and-shady story of the charismatic young director of a boys’ rescue centre, who ventures into the muddy world of council politics.